File:Badwater Basin & Devil's Golf Course, Death Valley National Park (32079974301).jpg

Taken from Dante's View (at 5,475ft) looking Northwest across the valley floor.

Badwater Basin is an endorheic basin in Death Valley National Park, California, noted as the lowest point in North America, with an elevation of 282 ft below sea level. It is demarcated by the white areas in the lower left of the picture.

The site itself consists of a small spring-fed pool of "bad water" next to the road in a sink; the accumulated salts of the surrounding basin make it undrinkable, thus giving it the name. The pool does have animal and plant life, including pickleweed, aquatic insects, and the Badwater snail.

At Badwater Basin, significant rainstorms flood the valley bottom periodically, covering the salt pan with a thin sheet of standing water. Newly formed lakes do not last long though, because the 1.9 in of average rainfall is overwhelmed by a 150 in annual evaporation rate. This is the greatest evaporation potential in the United States, meaning that a 12 ft lake could dry up in a single year. When the basin is flooded, some of the salt is dissolved; it is redeposited as clean crystals when the water evaporates.

The Devil's Golf Course is the off-white area in the top left of the picture. It was named after a line in the 1934 National Park Service guide book to Death Valley National Monument, which stated that "Only the devil could play golf" on its surface, due to a rough texture from the large halite salt crystal formations.

A former lake bed, the "golf course" consists of minerals dissolved in the lake's water and left behind as the lake slowly evaporated. Recent studies suggest that some areas of the salt and gravel beds have a depth ranging up to 9,000 feet.