The Stones That Were Filmed Moving: Racetrack Playa

The Traveler's Panel · checked 20 August 2026

Changing information. Prices, permits, seasons and road access change, sometimes at short notice. Everything here is a starting point for your own confirmation — not a quote, and not a guarantee. Verify with the operator and the relevant official body before you book.

Getting there — Las Vegas or Furnace Creek → Ubehebe Crater (pavement ends) → Teakettle Junction, 20 miles of gravel → The Grandstand, 26 miles → the sliding rocks, 2 miles further south

1. The turn-off is at Ubehebe Crater, in the north-west of the park, where the pavement ends. From there the Racetrack Valley Road runs 26 miles of rough gravel to the Grandstand parking area, passing Teakettle Junction at 20 miles. The sliding rocks are a further two miles south of the Grandstand, at the lower end of the playa, and the trails are best seen there.
2. The National Park Service's own wording is the wording to plan against: the road is rough; good tyres, four-wheel drive and high clearance are usually required; standard rental vehicles are not recommended and often get flat tyres. Allow at least three and a half hours each way from Furnace Creek.
3. Carry two spare wheels rather than one, and the tools to fit them. The park's backcountry roads page states that flat tyres are a common problem, that towing charges are high, and that motoring-club membership often does not cover tows on dirt roads. The nearest help is hours away and there is no mobile phone signal in the area.
4. There are no services of any kind on the road or at the playa: no fuel, no water, no toilets, no ranger station, no shade. Carry enough water and food to sit out an overnight breakdown, because that is the realistic failure mode.
5. Check the park's alerts and conditions page on the day you travel. Racetrack Road was among 95 miles of park roads closed by the remnants of Hurricane Hilary in August 2023 and did not reopen until 23 December that year. It was open as of the park's 18 August 2026 update, but a single storm changes that.
6. Go in winter or early spring if you want to understand what you are looking at. The mechanism needs standing water and a freezing night, and the surface is at about 3,720 feet, high enough to freeze when the valley floor 4,000 feet below does not. Do not walk on the playa while it is wet.

Indicative costs — verify before booking

What to pack

• Two full-size spare wheels, a jack that works on soft ground, a lug wrench and a compressor. One spare is the standard mistake here.
• More water than the drive appears to justify. The failure mode on this road is an overnight wait, not a walk out.
• Warm layers if you go in the season when the phenomenon happens. Ice forms at this elevation on nights when Furnace Creek does not come close to freezing.
• A paper map and a downloaded offline map. There is no mobile coverage on the road or at the playa.
• A long lens, and the discipline to use it. The best trails are the ones nobody has walked beside, and the way to keep them that way is to stay back.

Where to stay

There is nowhere to stay at Racetrack Playa and no facility of any kind on the road to it. Backcountry camping in the park is regulated and the playa itself is closed to vehicles entirely, so the practical options are the developed areas far to the east — Furnace Creek and Stovepipe Wells, both of which have lodging, fuel and water and both of which are a long way from the turn-off at Ubehebe Crater. That distance is the main reason the day is a seven-hour round trip on gravel before you have looked at anything. Some visitors base themselves in Beatty, Nevada, or in Lone Pine on the other side of the Sierra approach; we have not tested either and will not recommend a specific property. Whatever you choose, plan the day around leaving the playa with enough light to fix a puncture.

Safety & responsible travel

• Do not drive on the playa. It is prohibited, and the damage is documented: after one episode of illegal off-road driving, nineteen people from Friends of the Inyo and the National Park Service spent a weekend repairing 512 feet of tyre tracks with garden tools and 750 gallons of water. The Park Service notes that tracks in desert soils can remain visible for decades.
• Do not move or remove any rock. The instruction is explicit on the Park Service's own page, and it is not only about souvenirs: a rock lifted out of its trail destroys the record of a movement event, and the entire scientific literature on this site since the 1940s has been read off those trails.
• Stay off the surface when it is wet. The Park Service states that muddy footprints disrupt the rocks' movement and leave scars for years. The mud that records a stone also records a boot, and it does not distinguish between them.
• Do not rebuild the trails for a photograph, and do not repeat the mystery framing when you post the picture. The mechanism has been published, filmed and measured; presenting it as unexplained is what makes the site attract the kind of visit that damages it.
• Everything here is inside designated wilderness or beside it — Death Valley holds over 3,190,400 acres of it, about 93% of the park and the largest wilderness in the contiguous United States. Camp only where the park permits it, and pack out everything.

Nearby, and quieter

Ubehebe Crater, where the pavement ends, is worth the stop rather than the glance: a maar about half a mile across, formed when rising magma met groundwater, and the youngest of thirteen overlapping craters in a field whose most recent eruption the USGS dates to 2,100 years ago. Its depth is given as 600 feet by one Park Service page, 500 to 777 feet by another and 250 metres by the USGS. Teakettle Junction, twenty miles down the gravel, is a signpost hung with kettles left by passing drivers and is the only landmark on the road. The Grandstand, an outcrop of quartz monzonite at 3,781 feet, sits at the playa's northern end and is where the parking area is; the trails are two miles south of it. Ubehebe Peak, 5,678 feet, rises along the western side of the valley. And the Park Service points visitors who cannot manage the road toward Bonnie Claire Playa, which is easier to reach and shows the same phenomenon.

Getting there, in order

• 1Las Vegas or Furnace Creek
• ↓
• 2Ubehebe Crater (pavement ends)
• ↓
• 3Teakettle Junction, 20 miles of gravel
• ↓
• 4The Grandstand, 26 miles
• ↓
• 5the sliding rocks, 2 miles further south

Each leg is a separate booking and a separate chance to be weathered out. Build spare days into the chain, not onto the end of it.

Where it is

Racetrack Playa, Death Valley National Park, California · 36.6823°N 117.5515°W · Open in Google Maps · OpenStreetMap

Key locations

• Racetrack Playa research station — the met station in Norris et al.; the only coordinate here from a peer-reviewed paper
  36.6823°N 117.5515°W
• Racetrack Playa, southern end — approximate; where the trails are, and 3DEP returns 3,708 feet
  36.6660°N 117.5566°W
• The Grandstand, northern end — approximate; playa level beside the quartz monzonite outcrop USGS puts at 3,781 feet
  36.7019°N 117.5719°W
• Ubehebe Craters — the USGS volcano observatory coordinate; the pavement ends here
  37.0200°N 117.4500°W
• Furnace Creek climate station — NOAA station USC00042319, 59 m below sea level and 3.5 hours from the playa
  36.4626°N 116.8672°W

Coordinates are for orientation and are accurate to roughly the width of the feature named, not to a doorway. Several of these points are inside protected areas or need a permit, a guide or a boat — read the access notes above before you plan a route to any of them.

Sources & further reading — checked 20 August 2026

1. PLOS ONE — Norris, Norris, Lorenz, Ray and Jackson, Sliding Rocks on Racetrack Playa, Death Valley National Park: First Observation of Rocks in Motion (27 August 2014). The primary observation: ice 3 to 6 mm thick, winds of about 4 to 5 m/s, rock velocities of 2 to 5 m/min, the 4 December 2013 movements of 65.6 m and 64.1 m in 16 minutes from 11:05, the 20 December 2013 event in which more than sixty rocks moved, and the custom GPS loggers recording at one-second intervals
2. PubMed Central — full text of Norris et al. (2014), PMC4146553. The masses of the instrumented rocks (A3 at 16.6 kg, A6 at 8.2 kg, A10 at 15.6, A11 at 15.4); the weather station at 36.6823N 117.5515W; the November 2013 rain of 3.61 cm and about 20 cm of snow; the pond at about 10 cm maximum depth from late November to early February; the windowpane wording; the 9 January 2014 direct sighting; the 224 m maximum seasonal travel; the rocks sourced from the Panamint Springs Member of the Darwin Canyon Formation; and the earlier wind-speed estimates of Shelton, Sharp, Bacon and Reid
3. Earth Surface Dynamics Discussions — Lorenz, Norris, Jackson, Norris, Chadbourne and Ray, Trail formation by ice-shoved sailing stones observed at Racetrack Playa (2, 1005-1022, 2014). The bulldozing description of the mechanism; the estimate that rocks moved for a few minutes in close to a decade, about one millionth of the time; the movement dates of 4, 20 and 21 December 2013 and 5 and 9 January 2014; the playa given as a nearly flat 4.5 by 2 km lakebed at 1300 m; rocks up to about 300 kg, mostly dark grey dolomite with a few granite boulders; and the statement that these were the first movements since about 2005
4. American Journal of Physics 79(1), 37-42 — Lorenz, Jackson, Barnes, Spitale and Keller, Ice rafts not sails: Floating the rocks at Racetrack Playa (January 2011). The prediction three years before the observation: that ice works by buoyantly reducing the reaction and friction forces at the bed rather than by increasing wind drag; the 64 g basalt pebble frozen in a plastic food container into a raft about 3 cm thick and 20 cm across, moved in a sand-filled baking tray by a push of a few millinewtons; and the claim that modest rafts can reduce the required wind speed to arbitrarily small values
5. NASA Astrophysics Data System — Lorenz and Jackson, Declining rock movement at Racetrack Playa, Death Valley National Park: An indicator of climate change? (Geomorphology 211, 116, 2014). Seven years of monitoring finding fewer movement events than the historical record implies, and a Monte Carlo analysis giving roughly four-to-one odds that the movement probability has systematically declined, attributed to fewer occurrences of strong winds with freezing temperatures
6. USGS Publications Warehouse — Messina and Stoffer, Terrain analysis of the Racetrack basin and the sliding rocks of Death Valley (Geomorphology 35(3-4), 253-265, 2000). The first comprehensive mapping of the trails: 162 rocks and trails surveyed with submetre differential GPS in July 1996 to about 30 cm accuracy; the finding that trail character relates more to where a rock rested at the onset of motion than to the rock itself; and only four rocks repositioned during the 1997-98 El Nino winter
7. USGS Open-File Report 99-153 — Slate (ed.), Proceedings of Conference on Status of Geologic Research and Mapping in Death Valley National Park (1999). The single most important source for this dossier's correction: a USGS publication stating in 1999, fifteen years before the filming, that the trails were caused most likely by ice-rafted rocks occasionally pushed across the playa during winter windstorms
8. The Journal of Geology 104(1), 121-125 — Bacon, Cahill and Tombrello, Sailing Stones on Racetrack Playa (1996). The wind-only case: wind-shear and gust data from Owens Dry Lake about 80 km SSE, argued as consistent with static-friction thresholds allowing motion of 30 of the 31 rocks for which data were available — the position the 2013 observations superseded
9. National Park Service — Death Valley's Moving Rocks. The Park Service's own account: rocks weighing as much as 320 kilograms or 700 pounds, trails stretching for hundreds of metres, remote observations from 2011 to 2013 showing a rare combination of water, ice and wind, the prohibition on driving on the playa or moving any rock, and the alternative of Bonnie Claire Playa
10. National Park Service — Mystery Solved: mysterious sailing stones of Death Valley seen in action for the first time (27 August 2014). The park's release figures, which differ slightly from the paper's: water about 7 cm deep, ice under 5 mm, winds of 3 to 5 m/s described as about 10 mph, rocks at 2 to 6 m/min, movements of a few seconds to 16 minutes and over 60 m; the statement that movement was last suspected in 2006; and Richard Norris's remark that the team expected to wait five or ten years without anything moving
11. National Park Service — The Racetrack (visitor page). The road: 26 miles to the Grandstand, Teakettle Junction at 20 miles, the sliding rocks two miles south of the Grandstand parking, good tyres and 4x4 and high clearance usually required, standard rental vehicles not recommended and often getting flat tyres, at least 3.5 hours each way, no mobile phone coverage; the playa given as about 3 miles by 2 miles over mud at least 1,000 feet thick; and the rules on driving, rock removal and wet-surface footprints
12. National Park Service — Restoration Work at Death Valley Racetrack (15 March 2018). The documented vehicle damage and its repair: 512 feet of tyre tracks worked on by nineteen people from Friends of the Inyo and the National Park Service using garden tools and 750 gallons of water, restoring the playa's natural polygon patterning
13. National Park Service — Off-Road Driving in Death Valley. That off-road driving is prohibited park-wide, that 785 miles of established open roads are available instead, and the caption statement that tyre tracks from illegal off-road travel may be visible for decades in fragile desert soils
14. National Park Service — Backcountry Roads, Death Valley. That flat tyres are a common problem for backcountry visitors because of rough road conditions, that towing charges are high and motoring-club cover often excludes tows on dirt roads, and that mobile reception is non-existent in most areas of the park
15. National Park Service — Alerts and Conditions, Death Valley (checked 22 August 2026; page last updated 18 August 2026). The live road-status picture used in this dossier: Racetrack Valley Road not listed among current closures, Titus Canyon Road closed 1 October 2026 to 30 September 2027 for a second phase of repairs, and Darwin Falls likely closed until summer 2027
16. National Park Service — Additional areas opening 12/23: North Highway, Ubehebe Crater and The Racetrack (December 2023). The reopening of 95 miles of roads damaged by the remnants of Hurricane Hilary, including Racetrack Road, on 23 December 2023, funded through an NPS Disaster Supplemental and Federal Highway Administration Emergency Relief for Federally Owned Roads
17. National Park Service — Geologic Formations of Death Valley. The Racetrack Dolomite placed in the Middle Cambrian and described as nearly black to grayish-yellow dolomite with some chert nodules, within a rock record running from 1.8 billion-year-old metamorphic rocks to modern playa sediments
18. National Park Service — Lightscape and Night Sky, Death Valley. That the park holds some of the darkest night skies in the United States and that the Racetrack area in particular is named by the Park Service as an excellent place to observe them
19. National Park Service — Death Valley National Park's dark, starry nights earn international dark sky recognition (20 February 2013). The February 2013 certification as the third International Dark Sky Park in the National Park System and the largest at the time, and the lighting retrofits at Furnace Creek and Stovepipe Wells that were required to qualify
20. DarkSky International — Death Valley National Park. The Gold Tier Dark Sky Park designation, the 2013 certification date, the 13,848 km2 certified area, and the note that the lights of distant Las Vegas and other cities still reach the park's skies
21. National Park Service — Soundscapes, Death Valley. That portions of the park are among the most naturally quiet places in the continental United States, and that road noise spreads deep into canyons and wilderness far from the road itself
22. National Park Service — Road Maintenance Includes Acoustic Research (2018). The 2018 pavement-noise study on Badwater Road, Beatty Cutoff and Mud Canyon Road with the US Department of Transportation's Volpe Center, and the park's statement that road noise carries surprising distances in Death Valley because it is so quiet
23. National Park Service — 2025 Visitation, Death Valley. More than 1.32 million visitors in 2025, the park's fourth-highest year on record, despite a 43-day government shutdown and flash-flood closures
24. National Park Service — Wilderness, Death Valley. Over 3,190,400 acres of designated wilderness, roughly 93% of the park, described as the largest wilderness in the contiguous United States
25. National Park Service — Death Valley FAQs. More than 300 miles of paved roads, 300 miles of improved dirt roads and several hundred miles of unmaintained four-wheel-drive roads in the park
26. National Park Service — Fees and Passes, Death Valley. Entrance at USD 30 per private vehicle for seven days, USD 25 per motorcycle, USD 15 per individual on foot or bicycle, and a USD 55 park annual pass; and that the park does not accept cash
27. National Park Service — Weather and Climate, Death Valley. Average rainfall of less than 2 inches at Furnace Creek with an annual figure of 1.94 in; the 134F record of 10 July 1913; and the lapse rate of 3 to 5F per thousand feet gained, which is why the Racetrack at about 3,720 feet freezes when the valley floor does not
28. National Weather Service, Las Vegas — Weather and Climate of Death Valley National Park. The record extremes: 134F on 10 July 1913 and 15F on 8 January 1913; the wettest year on record in 2005 at 4.73 inches or 120.1 mm; years with no rain at all in 1929, 1953 and 1989; and the only measurable snow at Furnace Creek, half an inch on 29 January 1922
29. National Weather Service — Beaufort Wind Scale. That force 12, hurricane, begins at 64 knots — about 33 m/s — and that 8 to 12 mph, the band the observed 4 to 5 m/s falls into, is force 3, a gentle breeze
30. NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information — station GHCND:USC00042319, Death Valley National Park, CA. The park's long-record climate station at 36.46263N, 116.8672W, elevation -59.1 m, with a period of record running from 26 April 1961
31. USGS — Racetrack Playa (photograph caption, playa description). The playa placed in the southern Cottonwood Mountains of the Panamint Range at just over 3,800 feet, covering about 5 square miles, slightly higher at its north end near the Grandstand, with the sliding rocks found mostly at the lower southern end — and the still-open framing that the mechanism has been investigated for nearly a century
32. USGS — Racetrack Playa (photograph caption, ponding at the south end). That the south end of the playa is a couple of feet lower than the north end and that water there is typically only a few inches thick — and a caption that still hedges between ice-rafting and direct wind, citing Messina and Stoffer 1999
33. USGS — The Grandstand (photograph caption). The Grandstand as a large outcrop of quartz monzonite at an elevation of 3,781 feet rising above the mud at the playa's northern end
34. USGS — Karen, a sliding rock (photograph caption). Karen described as a block of Racetrack Dolomite and one of the largest of the sliding rocks, estimated at between 700 and 800 pounds
35. USGS — Ubehebe Peak (photograph caption). Ubehebe Peak at 5,678 feet rising along the western side of the Racetrack Playa valley, and the active fault system whose rift valley Racetrack Road follows
36. USGS California Volcano Observatory — Ubehebe Craters. The coordinate used in this dossier's panel, 37.02N 117.45W, with an elevation of 752 m; thirteen overlapping craters of maar and tuff ring type; the main crater about 800 m wide and 250 m deep; an ejecta blanket of about 40 km2; and a most recent eruption 2,100 years ago
37. USGS 3DEP Elevation Point Query Service — Racetrack Playa research station. An elevation of 1,135.95 m at the published coordinate of the research weather station, against the 1,300 m given in the Lorenz group's paper and the just-over-3,800-feet figure in the USGS caption
38. USGS 3DEP Elevation Point Query Service — northern playa. An elevation of 3,721.5 feet at the northern end of the playa beside the Grandstand outcrop
39. USGS 3DEP Elevation Point Query Service — southern playa. An elevation of 3,708.2 feet at the southern end of the playa, about thirteen feet below the northern reading and consistent with the USGS caption placing the south end lower
40. National Park Service — Ubehebe Crater (visitor page). The crater given as 600 feet deep and half a mile across, formed possibly as recently as 2,100 years ago when rising magma met groundwater — the point at which the pavement ends and the Racetrack road begins
41. National Park Service — Ubehebe Crater (places entry). A different depth from the same agency: 500 to 777 feet, or 152 to 237 m, depending which ridge it is measured from, with a diameter of about 0.5 miles, and the crater set about 8 miles west of Scotty's Castle
42. NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory — Cassini Finds Titan Lake is Like a Namibia Mudflat (19 April 2012). The planetary-science reason a Death Valley playa is studied at all: Cassini radar work led by Thomas Cornet concluding that Ontario Lacus on Titan drains and refills from below, with the Etosha Pan in Namibia used as the terrestrial analogue
43. Federal Highway Administration, National Scenic Byways — Sliding Rocks at Racetrack Playa (photograph caption). A United States federal page still describing the sliding rocks as one of the apparent mysteries of Death Valley whose mechanism is the subject of countless hypotheses — evidence that the unsolved framing survives inside government, not only in the travel press

Official and scientific bodies are the authority for safety, regulatory and scientific claims. Commercial operators are used only for practical detail such as tour length, meeting points and indicative pricing — never for a safety or scientific statement.