People Actually Live In Death Valley Year-Round

by Pauli Poisuo

Let’s say you want to live in a really dangerous place, since you fancy yourself a badass. And no, I'm not talking about dangerous as in ”supervillain lair filled with traps,” or “mold-infested hovel that fills your lungs with spores, then falls down on you,” or “Florida.” You want to find a geographical spot on God’s Green Earth that’s the exact opposite of all of those descriptives, and then live there in determined solitude, finding grim comfort in the knowledge that the very environment will do its level best to murder your ass 24/7.

After some research, you settle on Death Valley, which in hindsight should have been the obvious destination from the second you made your plans. This insanely intense California region is mostly as dry as parchment, and its temperatures during summer hover somewhere in the vicinity of 120 °F (49 °C). It can also get as cold as 15 °F (−9 °C), so you can handily experience both ends of the sliding temperature scale of “screw every single part of this.” Because Death Valley doesn’t even consider playing fair, there’s also the possibility of the occasional, rare flash flood. Oh, and the place is littered with scorpions, so good luck wandering about at night.

In other words: perfect.

Come on over to our cookout, everyone!

You pack your stuff into a funky-smelling Winnebago that you bought from a shady guy behind the 7-11, and head to California. With the utmost confidence that you alone can tame the wilderness, you seek a suitable spot in Death Valley, and after some careful consideration, venture for a quick walk just outside of your new, lethal home ... when suddenly, a random lady decked in LuluLemon activewear jogs past you with a happy nod as she passes by. She then disappears into the heat haze just as your jaw hits the desert floor and becomes the now-convenient receptacle for your first five scorpion stings.

What you just saw wasn’t a hallucinatory cry for help from your poor, simmering brain. On the bad news front, however, your mission to become the ultimate survivalist just hit a considerable bump in the road, because that person was merely one of the surprisingly many regular residents of Death Valley, who have actually acclimatized themselves to withstand the grueling environment.

There’s an estimated 300 or so people who live in this hot, dry hellhole all around the year, mostly in the employ of the local hospitality industry — after all, for whatever else it is, Death Valley is also a notable national park. In delightful recognition of their living arrangement, the area they’ve mostly settled in is even called Furnace Creek.

So, how on earth can they live in such a scorching area? Apparently, they simply force their bodies to adapt. The folks who live in Death Valley say that after enduring an admittedly very uncomfortable year or so, the body apparently just decides: “Welp, apparently this is my life now.” At this point, the locals can hang around in the heat just fine, provided that they remember to hydrate and make doubly sure that their communications and transport are in order so they don’t end up stranded in the unforgiving desert. This system works so well that while most of the residents’ houses are equipped with some pretty heavy-duty air conditioning, some of them don’t even bother using the AC at all. One Death Valley resident says that she starts to feel cold at 80 °F.

Oh, and that jogging lady we mentioned earlier? That's not hyperbole. The Death Valley locals can and absolutely do jog in the summer months, presumably because after that first year of natural selection has weeded out the weak, the remaining people are so hardy that they have a running group. “We'd never, ever tell a visitor to go running in Death Valley in the summer," one resident notes. "But if you run every day and your body is used to running at 119 degrees, then 120 isn't much of a difference."