World's Tallest Thermometer, Baker, California

The steel tower rising from the desert floor in the small town of Baker is not just a roadside curiosity. It is a very precise monument to a very extreme temperature measurement.

The structure stands one hundred thirty-four feet tall and is capable of displaying a maximum reading of one hundred thirty-four degrees Fahrenheit. Both numbers were chosen deliberately. On July tenth, nineteen thirteen, a thermometer at Furnace Creek Ranch in Death Valley, about forty miles southwest of here, recorded one hundred thirty-four degrees Fahrenheit. That measurement stood for over a century as the highest reliably recorded air temperature in history on the surface of the Earth.

Baker businessman Willis Herron built the thermometer in nineteen ninety-one as an attraction for his Bun Boy restaurant and the travelers stopping on the long, empty stretch of Interstate Fifteen between Las Vegas and Los Angeles. The Young Electric Sign Company of Salt Lake City constructed it at a cost of seven hundred thousand dollars. Almost immediately after it went up, winds of seventy miles per hour snapped it in half. It was rebuilt.

The structure is made of steel, weighs seventy-six thousand eight hundred twelve pounds, and is anchored by one hundred twenty-five cubic yards of concrete. It can display the actual current temperature in Baker in giant illuminated digits visible from the highway.

Herron sold the thermometer in the early two thousands and it fell into disrepair. After his death, his widow worked for years to reclaim it, and in two thousand fourteen she regained ownership and used her personal savings to restore the monument and return it to working order. It now stands again as Baker's unlikely claim to world-record status, marking the gateway to the hottest place on earth.