Saline Valley Warm Springs Campground is closed and Death Valley National Park has not said when it will reopen. A fire started around 7 p.m. on September 15, 2026, and the Park Service announced the closure the next day. Nobody was hurt. Everyone at the site was evacuated.
The fire stayed inside the Lower Spring area. It destroyed a shed at the volunteer camp host’s site that the park describes as a potential source of hazardous materials, and that is why the closure is open-ended rather than a couple of days. The Park Service’s initial assessment is that the piping running to and from the Lower Springs pools melted, though the soaking tubs themselves appear undamaged. The Palm Springs section of the primitive campground did not burn. Superintendent Mike Reynolds: “Right now, we need the public to stay away from Saline Valley Campground until the hazards are assessed and dealt with and the site can be safe for the public to access.” The cause is under investigation.
The fuel is the part worth sitting with. It was the skirts of dead fronds on roughly 80 nonnative palm trees. Most of those palms at Lower Springs burned, and the park expects some to survive. Death Valley is the driest place in the country, and it is easy to drive in assuming there is nothing out there that can carry a fire. At a spring there is. Dead fronds carry fire well, as this one showed, and they stand directly over the thing everybody makes that drive for.
This matters more than a typical campground closure because of where it is. Saline Valley Warm Springs sits about 40 miles from the nearest paved road. The park classes its primitive campgrounds as reachable by unpaved road only, high clearance 4x4 required, with no services, no water, and everything packed out. That is most of a day each way. A closure you learn about when you arrive costs you a trip, not an hour.
So before you commit to the drive, read the park’s news releases, not just the camping page. Death Valley’s main camping page was last updated September 18, 2025 and does not mention Saline Valley at all. That is ordinary for a park planning page, and it is no use to you here. The releases at nps.gov/deva are where the current answer lives. The park’s phone number is 760-786-3200, and since the park warns that its primitive roads come with poor cell service, a call before you leave pavement is worth more than any app.
Nothing here changes the rest of the park. The camping limit outside Furnace Creek is still 30 days per calendar year, and Furnace Creek has its own 14-day annual limit, both verified on the park’s camping page on September 18, 2026.
If Saline Valley was the anchor of a California loop, you now need a different anchor. Free camping in California covers what is open on public land outside the park, with the managing agency for each. And the usual rule applies harder than normal out here: the posted sign and whatever a ranger tells you on the day beat this page and every other website.