The Devil's Golf Course is a large salt pan in Death Valley National Park, with a rough surface formed of large salt crystals. It was named after a line in a 1934 National Park Service guide book to Death Valley, which stated that "only the devil could play golf" on its surface.
In the Holocene epoch, a lake covered the valley to a depth of 30 feet (9.1 m); the salt in Devil's Golf Course consists of the minerals that were dissolved in the lake water and left behind as the lake evaporated. With an elevation several feet above the valley floor in Badwater, the Devil's Golf Course remains dry, allowing weathering processes to sculpt the salt there into complicated forms.