When Death Valley became a National Park Service unit in 1933, the park quickly realized that the roads needed to be improved to better facilitate the growing visitation. The image on the right shows the main road into the park from Death Valley Junction in 1934 – which was the main road!
There were a lot of challenges to building a road through the hottest climate in the United States. In addition to the heat, Death Valley has a variety of landscapes – including places like the sand dunes and marshy areas – made it difficult to build durable, permanent roads.
Our driving experience today is very similar to that of early visitors. Once the roads were build in the 1930s, park maintenance took over the responsibility of caring for this resource and continues to protect it to this day!
The image on the left is of the CCC boys oiling the road between the Furnace Creek Inn and Cow Creek in 1934. Daily maintenance and big repaving projects which roads crews do is a great example of the historic preservation of this living resource! Just another reason to thank the hard-working park maintenance staff for everything they do.
