Into Death Valley with Nick Knowles

It's a scorcher in Death Valley as Nick takes to the adrenaline-pumping sport of sand buggy driving on Dumont Dunes, speeding up and down the vast sand hills. His companion, expert buggy driver Shane Trittler, is shocked but admires Nick's daredevilry. Nick wants to see for himself how hard it is to survive here. He meets up with survival expert Tom Coyne who once trekked 135 miles across Death Valley in summer, carrying no food or water. He shows Nick how to forage for food and find water, and how to make fire with a bowie knife, string and two pieces of wood, a notoriously tough task – is Nick up to the challenge?

Camping in the desert, Nick feels close to the landscape and a dawn he sets off for Zabriskie Point, one of the best viewpoints of the Valley as the light spreads across the craggy mountains, dunes, craters and salt flats. Mylar balloons are a problem in the Valley. Floating over from nearby Las Vegas or LA, they snare up power lines, causing fires, and pose a risk to wildlife. One intrepid group of balloon vigilantes range across Death Valley recovering and disposing of them. Nick joins them for half day, astonished to see that they've gathered 92 balloons in the previous fortnight. Park ranger Matthew Lamar is a keen amateur astronomer. Nick meets him to see one of the wonders of the Valley: the panorama of the night sky, with almost no light pollution, giving an unparalleled view of the planets and the Milky Way. He shows Nick incredible views of Saturn and Jupiter.

In the middle of Death Valley is Furnace Creek, an oasis at the heart of this scorching, barren location. Nick visits the lowest golf course in the world there. He meets Dan Forethorpe, a member of the Timbisha Shoshone tribe who have been residents in the Valley for thousands of years, and polishes off his visit with a round of golf, made extra tough by the low altitude.

Nick travels from the golden dunes at the southern tip of Death Valley, through the barren salt flat of Badwater Basin to the best-preserved ghost town, Rhyolite, in the north, ending up at Death Valley Junction – for a night at the opera! One of Death Valley's most dangerous residents is the rattlesnake.

Nick meets Danielle Wall who makes her living by recovering unwanted snakes from houses and gardens. Rattlesnakes are common here and on average cause five deaths per year in the USA, so Nick is alarmed to discover that experts like Danni are opposed to removing captured snakes' venom. Nick hears how the Valley was named by a group of pioneers in 1849 who took an ill-fated shortcut through the Valley in search of the California gold fields. Getting lost, they took 18 weeks to walk through to the fertile plains beyond the Panamint Mountains and arrived, parched and starving. As they left, one of them looked back, saying, "Goodbye, Death Valley" and the name stuck.

Nick joins plant specialist Ian Torrence whose job is to remove invasive tamarisk plants which spread fast and drink up to 20 gallons of water a day, killing everything around them. To preserve the fragile ecology here, this work has to be done without vehicles, and hard at work, Nick is overcome with the scorching heat. Not all non-natives are enemies though: Nick visits a date farm, planted over 100 years ago when the government were looking for crops that would thrive here. So successful was this plan that 90% of the USA's dates are now grown in California. Fifty years after the Gold Rush pioneers got lost here, gold was actually discovered in the Valley. Nick visits the ghost town of Rhyolite which had a brief period of fame as a rich seam of gold was found in the hills surrounding it. Around 8000 people moved here, and banks, schools, a prison and a railway station sprung up – but within eight years the gold had run out and the miners moved on. Nick's final stop is at the Amargosa Opera House at Death Valley Junction. Here ballerina and artist Marta Becket created her own private theatre, painted from top to bottom in lavish style. She performed ballets and musical theatre here the next 50 years until she died in 2017 aged 92. The theatre remains a monument to her artistic expression.