Death Valley National Park warns of overnight power outage and service disruptions

Power was set to go out across most of Death Valley National Park from 6 p.m. June 24 to 4 a.m. June 25, and the outage landed squarely on the parts of a desert trip that matter most after dark. Panamint Springs Resort was not affected, but Stovepipe Wells Village and The Oasis at Death Valley were expected to face interruptions to cell service and possible limits on lodging, restaurants, the general store, EV charging and gas or diesel sales.

That made fuel planning just as important as room keys and dinner reservations. Death Valley says there are three gas stations in the park. The Oasis at Death Valley in Furnace Creek sells gasoline and diesel, Panamint Springs Resort sells gasoline and diesel, and Stovepipe Wells sells 87-octane gasoline but not diesel. Fuel is available around the clock at Furnace Creek and Stovepipe Wells, while Panamint Springs Resort sells gasoline from 7 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. daily. There are no rapid EV chargers inside the park, and the closest rapid chargers are in Beatty, Nevada, 43 miles from Furnace Creek.

The park’s directions page makes the travel risk plain. There is no public transportation to or within Death Valley, there is no cell phone service along most park roads, and help may be many hours away. Visitors are told to travel prepared to self-rescue, and to keep checking the road-status map because conditions can change quickly. In a park where distances are long and services are sparse, even a nighttime utility interruption can change whether a road trip keeps moving after dinner or waits until daylight.

Death Valley has seen bigger disruptions before. A 65-hour park-wide outage over the Christmas 2023 weekend affected 450 residents and visitors, and staff had to truck water to Stovepipe Wells Resort when its tank fell below critical fire-suppression levels. In July 2024, Furnace Creek reached 129.3 degrees and the park recorded nine consecutive days at or above 125 degrees.

That is part of the reality in a park that covers more than 3.4 million acres, stretches across nearly 1,000 miles of paved and dirt roads, and is more than 93% roadless wilderness. When the lights went out for those overnight hours, the consequences reached far beyond the power lines.