Here’s some highlights from recent Death Valley News:

New Death Valley Superintendent

Kathy Billings Selected as the new superintendent for Death Valley National Park. Kathy has been with the National Park Service for 29 years and has worked in all four deserts in the United states in Big Bend National Park, Joshua Tree National Park, Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, and Great Basin National Park. She has served as superintendent at USS Arizona Memorial, Great Basin National Park, Organ Pip Cactus National Monument, and Pecos National Historical Park.

You can read more about the new park superintendent by clicking here.

DV Certified a Dark Sky Park

Stand in the valley and look up: Death Valley National Park has received international Dark-Sky Association certification. Death valley joins only two other U.S. National Parks (Big Bend National Park and Natural Bridges National Monument are the other two) in receiving dark sky certification, affirming what we who visit it regularly already knew: that those skies give some of the best night sky viewing in the United States.

We’ve always long suspected it, but this week the World Meteorological Organization has confirmed it: Death Valley is officially the hottest place on Earth!

The record was originally set by a temperature recording of 134 degrees fahrenheit on July 10, 1913 at Greenland Ranch, now called Furnace Creek. However, the title of Hottest Place on Earth was snatched away from Death Valley in 1922 when a record temperature of 136.4 degrees was logged in Libya.

A recent investigation conducted by a committee, which included experts from Libya, the United States, Egypt and others, found that a number of mistakes were made at the time by an observer who was inexperienced with the equipment he was using. The extreme temperature also did not match to the extremes of other nearby locations. The committee concluded that the measurement was incorrect and may have been off by as much as 7 degrees.

DeathValley.com is following the progress of a unique project from the Friends of Jawbone (FOJ), a coalition in support of outdoor recreation opportunities in East Kern county. Dubbed the OwlsheadGPS Project, its goal is to gather and provide official agency OHV route data to the public for use with consumer GPS devices and mapping applications.

Located at "www.OwlsheadGPS.com," the project underwent a limited "soft" launch in December of 2011.  Now, some 5 months later, and with users increasing daily, no problems have been reported. Therefore, the project has lifted the registration requirement for participants and its data is now openly available to the public.  Still a pilot project, the OwlsheadGPS.com website currently covers the 1.2 million acres in the greater Jawbone Canyon area.