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Death Valley Eggs: Yes, You Can Fry Them, But Please Use A Skillet

Death Valley Littered With Eggs

Hot enough to fry an egg?

If any place on Earth can properly test that old saw, it's Death Valley. Especially during a heat wave.

America's southwest -- especially around Nevada and California -- has been smothered in triple-digit temperatures all week, flirting dangerously with the all-time recorded high of 134°F (56.7°C) at Greenland Ranch on July 10, 1913.

What to do when the temperature borders on uninhabitable?

Make breakfast, it seems. Or, at least, try to.

Death Valley Park, which straddles Nevada and California, has become one great big outdoor skillet -- a mess of runny eggs, cartons and shells left by visitors hoping to fry eggs in the hot sun.

On Tuesday, exasperated officials used the park's Facebook page to urge visitors to keep their experiments in a proper pan, writing "the Death Valley NP maintenance crew has been busy cleaning up eggs cracked directly on the sidewalk, including egg cartons and shells strewn across the parking lot."

Park officials, however, couldn't quite resist the temptation to test the old cliche.

In a YouTube video, an employee of the National Parks Service went about cooking up a proper breakfast in the desert sun.

She left a covered skillet in the hot sun for around two hours, before dropping an egg in it. (Instinctively, we found ourselves wishing she could have fished that wee bit of shell out before the fry-up.)

"It's not sizzling. But it is turning white," the narrator intones just a few moments into the experiment.

Fast forward six minutes and, well, hello breakfast.

"This proves that you can fry an egg in the desert sun," the park employee says. "It just has to be covered. you have to prevent the evaporation, which cools off the egg."

Still a bit runny.

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