On the windswept desert floor of Death Valley, there’s a place where rocks move across the ground all by themselves. No one has ever seen them move, and no one knows how they do it.

No one would know they move at all if it weren’t for the trails they leave behind in Racetrack Playa (pronounced PLY-uh), a nearly 3-mile-long stretch of flat ground in Death Valley National Park that has attracted scientists, researchers and curious observers ever since the stones were first discovered nearly a century ago.

The dried-up lakebed here, about an 80-mile drive from the park’s Furnace Creek visitor center, records the path that each stone leaves behind as it grinds its way along the earth. Some weigh as little as 25 to 30 pounds, while others weighing hundreds of pounds have been found, with trails hundreds or even thousands of feet long.

Though researchers have made numerous visits to the playa to study the rocks — including Joseph Crook, a prospector from Nevada who was the first to report the moving rocks in 1915, and later expeditions by geologists from the U.S. Geological Survey and UCLA in the mid-1940s, early 1950s and early 1970s — no one has come up with definitive proof of how or why they move.

“There are different theories out there and nobody knows for sure because nobody’s seen it,” said Cheryl Chipman, a spokeswoman for the park. “So all we have to go on are theories.”

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