

During those months you can enjoy guided walks and talks, evening programs and backcountry hikes departing from Furnace Creek Visitor Center and Museum. To avoid the stifling heat, consider visiting in October through April. The National Park Service does not advise hiking in the summertime.

So before you embark on this self-guided tour, bring water (lots and lots of it), sunscreen, sunglasses and a hat. Second, mountain ranges trap heat in Death Valley. even larger than the state of Connecticut. First of all, at more than 13,500 square kilometers, this is the largest national park in the contiguous U.S. It’s one thing to watch Han and Luke and Leia from the air-conditioned comfort of a movie theater or your home, but it’s a whole new world to observe the familiar scenery firsthand in Death Valley. Here are just a few locations (many of them found along California Highway 190) that will take you to another world. You, too, can have a Star Wars-themed experience in Death Valley. I regularly get thank you emails from other Star Wars fans who have used our information to have a special Star Wars day in Death Valley.” “We decided to document these locations because of our love for both Star Wars and Death Valley. “Death Valley provided the perfect desert landscape to get the necessary shots in a harsh environment of canyons, sand dunes and eroded hills,” Hall said.

While you could spend several years watching each episode and searching for the places captured on film, superfan Steve Hall created a self-guided Star Wars in Death Valley tour to point out shooting locations, from the colorful hills of Artist’s Palette to the ever-shifting Mesquite Flat Sand Dunes. If you’ve ever watched the Star Wars films - especially Episode IV - A New Hope and Episode VI - Return of the Jedi - you may not have known that you were looking at Death Valley. The sea eventually evaporated and left behind a land that is stark and surreal, monumental and mystifying - in other words, an ideal filming location. National Park Service, Death Valley was submerged beneath an inland sea during the Pleistocene Epoch. While George Lucas relied on his creative team at Industrial Light and Magic for many of the settings in his science fiction series, it couldn’t begin to match the size and scope of what Mother Nature created roughly 150 kilometers west of Las Vegas, Nevada.Īccording to the U.S. That is exactly why film director George Lucas thought it was the perfect setting for Star Wars. In fact, it’s like it belongs on another planet. Death Valley, which straddles the California- Nevada border, isn’t like the rest of the USA.
