How Low Can You Go? Badwater Basin, and a Real Hell on Earth

Salt flats at Badwater, -282 feet. The snowcapped mountain in the distance is Telescope Peak, 11,049 feet.

How bad could it be? On our recent trip to Death Valley, we made the rather mandatory pilgrimage to Badwater, the lowest point in North America at -282 feet (86 meters). Although the hottest temperature ever recorded on planet Earth was measured at Furnace Creek Ranch in 1913 (56.7°C; 134°F), it is known that Badwater is often 2 degrees hotter. That's hot. Really hot.

I've regularly worked and played in temperatures as high as 105°F without ill effect at home in the Great Valley of California. I floated down the Colorado River in August of 2013 where temperatures soared as high as 118°F, and I realized that I could have been in trouble if we didn't have the river to dip in every few minutes (because it flowed from deep within Lake Powell, the water temperature was around 48°F even many miles downstream). The hottest moment I've ever experienced was in the aforementioned Death Valley when we had an occasion to be there in late May, and an early heat wave shot temperatures to a near record 122°F. It was simply intolerable outdoors...we retreated to the motel room until the sun went down before emerging to seek dinner. People no doubt adapt to such conditions, but it can't be pleasant.

Alluvial fan just south of Badwater. The terraces on the fan are fault scarps, indicating the role of faulting in the subsidence  of Death Valley.

Standing at the lowest point in North America does cause one to consider other low places on the planet. The National Park Service provides a handy guide on interpretive signs and on their websites. They note that all of the low places also tend to be exceedingly dry and hot, and that the source of the low elevation is generally tectonic in origin. Those low points are as follows:

Dead Sea (Jordan/Israel) -1360 feet (-414 m)

Lake Assal (Djibouti, Africa) -509 feet (-155 m)

Turpan Pendi (China) -505 feet (-154 m)

Qattara Depression (Egypt) -435 feet (-133 m)

Vpadina Kaundy (Kazakstan) -433 ft (-132 m)

Denakil (Ethiopia) -410 ft (-125 m)

Laguna del Carbón (Argentina) -344 ft (-105 m)

Death Valley (United States) -282 ft (-86 m)

Vpadina Akchanaya (Turkmenistan) -266 ft (-81 m)

Salton Sea (California) -227 ft (-69 m)

Sebkhet Tah (Morroco) -180 ft (-55 m)

Sabkhat Ghuzayyil (Libya) -154 ft (-47 m)

Lago Enriquillo (Dominican Republic) -151 ft (-46 m)

Salinas Chicas (Argentina) -131 ft (-40 m)

Caspian Sea (Central Asia) -92 ft (-28 m)

Lake Eyre (Australia) -49 ft (-15 m)

The Black Mountains provide the backdrop to Badwater. They rise steeply more than a mile above the salt flats.

Looking at this list, it is clear that the Dead Sea is in a class by itself as far as low elevations are concerned. At nearly 1,400 feet below sea level, it is unique in the world. To find anything deeper, we have to reach back into the depths of geologic time. The Strait of Gibraltar is narrow and shallow, and is the only connection between the Mediterranean and any other ocean. What would happen if it ever separated the two oceans? It's not totally idle speculation...it turns out that this actually happened, about six million years ago. The speculation began when vast amounts of salt, gypsum and anhydrite deposits were discovered beneath the seafloor sediments of today's Mediterranean Sea.

When the cutoff occurred, the Mediterranean immediately began to dry up. And dried more. And then even more. The level of the sea dropped precipitously. It dropped past the 1,000 foot level. And then 2,000. And it kept going. Until the level of the basin reached 15,000 feet below sea level. Three miles below sea level. The implications are staggering in many ways. The Nile and Rhone Rivers would have started cutting deep channels far below their normal level. In places, the subsequent sedimentary layers hide canyons that were once 8,000 feet deep (The Grand Canyon, for comparison is 5-6 thousand feet deep). 

The climate changes would be extreme. Air sinking into the basin would increase temperatures at the dry adiabatic rate of 5.5°F per thousand feet. That amounts to conditions at the lowest reaches of the Mediterranean Basin that would be 70°F higher than they would be at sea level. In this desert environment, summertime temperatures could reach 176°F. No organisms could survive at these levels except for a few thermophiles. This is a place no human could or would be able to venture.

And imagine the end. Imagine the moment that the Atlantic Ocean began seeping over the Strait of Gibraltar. Seepage that turned into a torrent, and then a torrent that turned into a flood, and a flood that turned into a deluge beyond imagining. Some calculations suggest flows equivalent to 1,000 Amazon Rivers at once. The entire ocean basin could have filled in between a few months to two years. Sea level would have risen as much as 30 feet per day. This event is called the Zanclean Flood.

All in all, this place would have been hell on Earth, at least until the waters came...

PS: The Rhone River, not the Rhine. Correction made, thank you Olivier Malinur.

Weather a Bit Less Strange? Death Valley in the Last Two Days: Hot!

There is, of course, hardly such a thing as "average" weather, just like there is no "average" precipitation. I'm pretty sure that the number of days in a given year that actually match the average temperature is  limited. I've been to Death Valley twice in the last two weeks; for Memorial Day weekend, when the temperatures were very cool, like twenty degrees below average, and rainy. I was back there during the last two days, and conditions had taken a thirty degree swing in the other direction, hitting as high as 118°f on Sunday afternoon. It cooled to only 87°f overnight. Average for this time of year? 105°f for the high, and 77°f for the low.

I like to think of myself as a desert rat since I'm out there seemingly all the time, but it's not exactly true. I visit deserts most often when they are a great deal more amenable to human existence. Like Death Valley in winter. I live in a place that gets plenty hot sometimes in summer, but the term "hot" is defined by temperatures topping 100°f maybe a dozen days over the summer. The hottest temperature we've ever had at home was 113°f. So spending an afternoon at 118°f was a new experience. It wasn't fun. I don't like thinking about having a vehicle breakdown in weather like this, especially since cell phone coverage is very sparse in the park.

It's funny how pictures don't really communicate how hot it is. I stepped out of the car for just a few moments, and the heat hit me like a hammer. I know one can get used to conditions like this, but it takes time, and there are limits. A former student of mine worked as part of a public safety team in Death Valley in summer and described the delightful experience of answering emergency calls in full emergency gear. When it was 124 degrees...

The sun had sunk behind the Cottonwood Mountains, but the temperature barely budged. Despite the heat, a few people were out on the dunes, but they didn't venture far from the parking area. For the first time in twenty-five years of visiting Death Valley I noticed there were no footprints on the highest dune. It was just too darn hot to go that far.

It begs the question then: what the heck was I doing visiting Death Valley in almost-summer? The first visit is easier to explain. I had scored reservations for two nights camping on the North Rim of Grand Canyon National Park (a late cancellation no doubt; the next available dates are in August). That was for Memorial Day and the Tuesday after. But we had to get there somehow with no reservations for any place between my Great Valley in California and Grand Canyon. We looked at the weather report for Death Valley and saw that temperatures would be far below normal, so we decided to give camping a try at Furnace Creek. It worked out nicely although it spritzed rain and was windy on the second night. We were comfortable enough.

The second visit was for a more unusual reason. The BBC is working on a documentary on the science of color, and they wanted to use the salt pan at Death Valley National Park as a natural setting for the color white. The crew was already headed to the states when they decided they wanted a geologist to explain why the salt is present in Death Valley. Their staff member contacted the folks at AGI (American Geological Institute), and someone there contacted the former director of the NAGT (National Association of Geoscience Teachers), and he remembered something about me visiting Death Valley all the time. The BBC folks were delighted to find out that I was traveling that general direction and asked if I could meet them Sunday at Badwater.

We met up, but there was a problem. The Badwater salt pan wasn't white! It was mostly a dirty brown color. It seems that California's four year drought has even had an effect in Death Valley, a place that is already the driest spot in North America. In wet years, the Amargosa River (a usually dry water course that drains much of western Nevada) may flow enough to fill the Badwater Basin with a foot or so of water. The clay settles, the water evaporates, and salt forms a white crust. But there hasn't been a flooding event since 2010 or so, and dust has blown across the surface of the playa (dry lake bed) in most places.

It turns out there were a few fairly wide expanses of white salt to the south of Badwater. There haven't been the flooding events, but there are still springs along the base of the Black Mountains that flow onto the floor of the valley and keep the clay wet. Salty water rises through the clay by capillary action, and the moment the water reaches the surface it evaporates, causing the salt to precipitate on the surface of the clay, forming a thin crust. It's not quite like the inches or feet of salt seen at Badwater or the Devil's Golf Course, but it was white and covered several acres, so with a bit of forced perspective, the white surface could be made to seem cover a vast area. We headed out there.

If you look carefully, you can see our cars in the distance, a bit right of center.

It was a bit cooler in the morning, the high 80s, and the temperature was expected to top out at only 110 degrees. That could be a complication, because the film crew was accompanied by a park ranger who was ordered to shut down filming if temperatures exceeded 110 degrees. No exceptions.

The host of the documentary and I headed out to the salt pan. The sediments of the alluvial fan were cemented with salt and the footing was firm, but as soon as we reached the salt itself, we were actually walking in mud with a thin crust of salt. Any concerns about the temperature were eased, sort of, by the fact that the wind was howling at 20-30 mph or more, and that kept the temperature from soaring. Of course it also made a discussion of the geology difficult to record on the sound equipment.

I have my dependable desert hat that has never been blown off my head, but I lost it repeatedly out there. I eventually gave up and did the interview without it. I was discussing geology in the middle of a desert windstorm with the temperature wavering around 110 degrees on a salt flat with a relative humidity approaching zero percent. I went through three water bottles in the two hours we were out there and still got a bit dehydrated.

Still, the crew knew what they wanted to accomplish and worked very efficiently. I even got to walk in a circle next to the sound boom so they could have the sound of my boots crunching on the ground. It was mostly unscripted, but the host, a physicist, knew how to draw the information out of me. She asked good questions. We did three takes, and then spent a fair amount of time walking across the hot surface for atmosphere scenes. They finished my part and let me go on my way, but they stayed out there for another couple of hours. They work hard on this kind of thing!

Mrs. Geotripper spent all this time sitting with the vehicles and taking most of these pictures from a quarter mile away. Both she and I were quite hot and dehydrated, so we retreated to the cafe at Furnace Creek and drank lots of liquids, and then "got out of Dodge". We headed up Townes Pass, watching the temperature drop 25 degrees as we climbed nearly 4,500 feet up the highway (perfect confirmation of the environmental temperature lapse rate of 5.5 degrees per thousand feet of elevation). For some reason or another we ended the day at Mammoth Lakes at close to 8,000 feet. I think we just wanted to feel cold for awhile...

One of the Most Astounding Viewpoints in America: At the Outer Ring of Hell (but not really)

A place not to missed. That's what I have to say about Dante's View in Death Valley National Park. And if you ever get there, don't just stand in the parking lot. Short walks in several directions offer even better views of the incredible landscape surrounding the lowest place in North America. Death Valley may get hellishly hot sometimes, but it's not a view of hell but is instead a dramatic perspective of some of the most interesting geology in the American West.

The Black Mountains form the eastern margin of the deepest part of Death Valley, almost directly across from Telescope Peak, at 11,043 feet (3,366 meters) the highest point in the park. The viewpoint is a bit over a mile in elevation at 5,476 feet (1,669 meters). From the viewpoint one can take in almost the full length of Death Valley, a distance of more than 100 miles. Once also look east across the numerous mountain ridges of the Basin and Range geological province to Charleston Peak above Las Vegas, Nevada. A few summits of the Sierra Nevada peek out over the ridge of the Panamint Range across the valley.

Directly below one's feet is a steep one mile drop to Badwater on the valley floor. The slope is so steep that the parking lot and Badwater pond are not visible, but very small humans can be seen on the white trail leading out to the salt flats, and very small cars can be seen driving on the highway that circles the edge of the alluvial fan.

Here's a zoomed shot to see the people a bit better...

The Black Mountains are composed mostly of the oldest rocks in the region, a complex of gneiss and schist dating back 1.7 billion years. Similar rocks are found in the depths of the Grand Canyon in Arizona. They were once covered by several vertical miles of Paleozoic sedimentary rocks, but those rocks have slid westward to form the Panamint Mountains. The gap between became the graben of Death Valley itself.

The rocks making up the summit area are volcanic rocks, mostly rhyolite, which were erupted in violent eruptions around 6-7 million years ago. Such rocks have been found across the Basin and Range province, indicating extensional stretching and failure of the crust, which ultimately formed the grabens and horsts of the region.

I take my use of superlatives in describing viewpoints seriously. You can see my ten (eleven, actually) most precious "spots" in the world, and Dante's View is on that list. There may be other places in the world that allow one to see far, but I suspect few reveal a more stunning and fascinating landscape.

There is a myth sometimes repeated that one can see Mt. Whitney from Badwater, which is simply impossible because the Panamint Mountains rise 7,000-8,000 above the adjacent valley floor. One can see the tips of several Sierra Nevada peaks from the hill north of the parking lot at Dante's View, but I think the highest peak visible is Mt. Williamson at 14,389 feet (4,383 meters). It is possible to simultaneously see both the highest and lowest points of the conterminous United States, but you have to find your way to the summit ridge of the Panamint Mountains and Telescope Peak to do so.

It's truly a place and a view not to be missed.

Like a Gigantic Babushka Doll, One Death Valley inside Another Death Valley

Death Valley is a deep structural trough called a graben, formed by faults that stretched and broke the continental crust, mostly within the last two or three million years. It is just one of dozens that are present across the deserts of eastern California, all of Nevada, and much of western Utah, a region known as the Basin and Range Province.  But as grabens go, Death Valley stands out. It is almost twice as deep as the Grand Canyon, as the Panamint Mountains slope 11,000 feet down to the valley floor that sits below sea level. It's also one of the flattest places you can stand on planet Earth.

But the valley we see is only part of the story. As is always true of any mountain, if it sticks up into the atmosphere, it will be eroded. It doesn't matter how dry the climate is, erosion happens anyway, albeit at a slower pace perhaps. Sediments have been filling in these valleys. As high as the mountains are, another two miles are hidden by the sediments that fill the valley floor.

I imagine some people wonder what's under all that salt. Wouldn't it be cool to see some of the history revealed in those sediments?

All I can say is that Death Valley is one awesome piece of geology. Whatever you might seek about geological processes or history, there is probably a world-class example of it at the park. So you want to see what Death Valley would look like from the inside-out? We've got you covered! There have actually been two Death Valleys, and one of them has been turned on end for us to explore.

About 5 or 6 million years ago, extensional forces were stretching the crust in the Death Valley region, but from a different direction. A major fault graben opened up in a northwest/southeast direction, mountains rose on either side, and erosion began to fill in the trough. Eventually the sediments accumulated to a depth of a mile. Sometimes a permanent lake filled much of the valley, resulting in the deposition of layers of fine silt and clay. At other times, the lake dried up, leaving behind halite (table salt), gypsum, and borate minerals. Alluvial fans, composed of gravel and conglomerate, sometimes spread across the valley floor. There were occasional volcanic eruptions as well.

The sequence of sediments and lava flows is called the Furnace Creek formation. Few fossils are found in the rock, but trackways of horses, camels, mastodons, large cat and wolf ancestors, and birds have been found. These fossils point to a diverse ecosystem that was not quite as dry as that of today's Death Valley, but is certainly analogous to the Death Valley that existed during the ice ages.

Then things changed.

The regional stress pattern shifted and new faults formed, the faults that produced the present-day Death Valley graben. The deeply buried rocks of the Furnace Creek formation were pushed upwards, folded and tilted, and ultimately exposed to erosion. In the harsh desert climate soils do not develop on the fine silts, so the barren slopes give way to deep gullies and furrows called badlands topography.

And so today, we can have a look at Death Valley from the inside out.

Most tourists who visit Death Valley observe the Furnace Creek formation at the spectacular view from Zabriskie Point or from the resort area at Furnace Creek. We usually do a field exercise at Zabriskie, but the entire area was closed this year for renovation. So we headed up Twenty-Mule Team Canyon for a look at the colorful outcrops. The gravel road winds for several beautiful miles through the badlands.

The Furnace Creek formation was the greatest source of riches in the Death Valley region. Forget gold or silver or copper. The borate minerals, formed from geothermal hot springs in the graben of the Furnace Creek formation, were mined for their use as soaps and detergents, a flux in glass-making, in cosmetics, and numerous other applications. For a number of years in the late 1800s the only economic sources of the borate minerals in the world were in Turkey and Death Valley. They were still being mined in Death Valley as recently as 2005.

The Furnace Creek formation is a spectacular part of the scenery of Death Valley National Park, but the colorful exposures provide a window into the geologic history of the western United States as well. Peel away the surface layers and we find pieces of the past when conditions were far different. Peel back that layer, and we find another story.The Furnace Creek formation is but one of dozens of geologic strata exposing more than a billion years of changing environmental conditions. The park is one giant Babushka doll of geologic history.

A Sere and Barren Place. And the Biggest National Park in America's Lower Forty-Eight.

People don't feel isolation very often. Well, plenty of us do feel isolated, but it tends to be an isolation in which we are surrounded by people and the trappings of civilization, but are separated by our life situations, our depression, and our dependence on technology instead of our social skills. But how often are we completely cut off from civilization? I imagine it's somewhat rare these days.

In many parts of the country it is just plain impossible. Humans have made their mark on the land, paving it over, building cities, plowing farms. If the land is useful to humans in any way, it gets used up, and then some. And barren lands make many people uncomfortable to say the least. We seek the cities and towns for the most part.

It's a learning experience to see, and feel, the wild places. The Earth is the source of our water, our food, our material resources, and sometimes our inspiration. It's easy to take it for granted if we don't understand how it works. Which, in a nutshell, is why I teach, and why I take people to the wild places. And there are few places as wild and isolated as Death Valley National Park, the largest national park outside of Alaska.

It's true that about a million people visit the park every year, but they spend almost all their time at three places: Furnace Creek, Stovepipe Wells, and Scotty's Castle. They venture forth to Dante's View and Badwater, but invariably head back to the small outposts of civilization where they sleep in hotel rooms, RVs, or tents, and eat in the few restaurants. But there are those moments that people do experience a sense of the wild.

Badwater is one of those places where it is at least momentarily possible. People go there in droves because it is the lowest point in the western hemisphere (-280 feet; 86 meters), but they often step away from the parking lot and the interpretive signs and start walking onto the Death Valley salt pan, 110 square miles of barren salt and clay. It doesn't take but a few moments before the cars shrink to insignificance, and there is only the silence, or maybe just a bit of wind. Nothing lives there. One is standing in the bottom of a valley more than one hundred miles long with only a thin artery of pavement, and two little outposts of civilization thirty miles apart. It's about as close to the primeval Earth as one can be.

You are standing in one of the world's greatest geologic landscapes. The mountains to the east contain metamorphic rocks 1.7 billion years old, recording in their convoluted folds the collision of huge landmasses and growth of a gigantic mountain range that has since eroded away. The mountains to the west contain sedimentary rocks tens of thousands of feet thick. They record the deposition of limestone, shale, and sandstone along a continental margin that faced a brand new Pacific Ocean 600 million years ago. The fault scarps on the alluvial fan to the south record ancient earthquakes that over a few million years have produced some of the steepest and highest mountain ranges in the American west. More than 11,000 feet separates the summit of Telescope Peak from the valley floor.
The salt and clay of the valley floor record two million years of climate change. Dry warm periods alternated with colder glacial ages that sent meltwater coursing down the Owens Valley, through China Lake, Searles Lake, Panamint Lake and finally into Lake Manly, the freshwater lake that once filled Death Valley to a depth of 500 or 600 feet. Mineralized lake deposits cling to the cliffs above Badwater.

Standing for a brief moment in the middle of nothingness can bring the incredible history of the Earth into sharp focus. But it's not long before our schedule tears us away from the solitude of the moment and we climb into the vehicles and move on towards the comfort of camp, and bathrooms, and dinner. In 1849, a band of travelers had a completely different experience. They were stranded in the valley for several months, having traveled an untested route to California's gold fields. Although only one of their party succumbed during the ordeal, the reputation of Death Valley as a dangerous place was set in stone. The dangers can be real.

In a picture, or in a vehicle, the road looms large. It fills our field of vision, giving us the illusion that humans have somehow conquered this landscape. But it is an illusion. We are not in charge, and all it takes to find this out is the smallest of problems. An overheated radiator. An oil leak. A miscalculation of the mileage in a rental car that is now out of gas. There's no phone service. Even the GPS is sometimes a problem out there. People have been stranded on old mining roads that aren't patrolled regularly. Death Valley didn't necessarily deserve the name it was given in the beginning, but death is no stranger to this place.

It is the hottest and driest place on the continent. It is indeed the hottest place in the world. But in the right season, Death Valley is a delightful place to visit. And it is one of the best places in the world to learn geology in the most dramatic way possible. And  a place where one can learn the value of solitude, for a little while at least.

Out of the Valley of Death: Hitting the Lowest of the Low, the Driest of the Dry, and the Hottest of the Hot

Just how low can one go? Just how far can people descend in life before they hit bottom? In Death Valley National Park, there is a precise answer: -282 feet, or -85.5 meters at a spot called Badwater. That's also the lowest you can go in North America, but if you look at the big picture, there are seven other places around the world where you can sink even lower:

Earth’s Lowest Elevations (Courtesy of the National Park Service)

• Dead Sea (Jordan/Israel) -1360 feet (-414 m)
• Lake Assal (Djibouti, Africa) -509 feet (-155 m)
• Turpan Pendi (China) -505 feet (-154 m)
• Qattara Depression (Egypt) -435 feet (-133 m)
• Vpadina Kaundy (Kazakstan) -433 ft (-132 m)
• Denakil (Ethiopia) -410 ft (-125 m)
• Laguna del Carbón (Argentina) -344 ft (-105 m)
• Death Valley (United States) -282 ft (-86 m)
• Vpadina Akchanaya (Turkmenistan) -266 ft (-81 m)
• Salton Sea (California) -227 ft (-69 m)
• Sebkhet Tah (Morroco) -180 ft (-55 m)
• Sabkhat Ghuzayyil (Libya) -154 ft (-47 m)
• Lago Enriquillo (Dominican Republic) -151 ft (-46 m)
• Salinas Chicas (Argentina) -131 ft (-40 m)
• Caspian Sea (Central Asia) -92 ft (-28 m)
• Lake Eyre (Australia) -49 ft (-15 m)

I had this awesome idea! I bet no one has ever thought to take their picture here before!

As the park service notes, most of these lowest points have a few things in common: they are very dry, and the origin of their low altitude is tectonic. The Basin and Range Province of which Death Valley is part of has been described as "The Broken Land" by Frank DeCourten, and indeed it is: fault after fault breaks up the Earth's crust into high mountain ranges (horsts) and deep fault basins (grabens). Death Valley is the ultimate expression of the process with relief of 11,330 feet between Telescope Peak (11,049 feet) and Badwater (-282 feet). The highest point in the United States outside of Alaska, Mt. Whitney (14,505 feet), is only 76 miles away as the crow flies.

If erosion wasn't a thing that happened, Death Valley would be even deeper. The sand and gravel that fills the Death Valley graben extends to a depth of about 9,000 feet, meaning if the gravel weren't there, the total relief would be 4 miles!

Fault scarps interrupt the smooth surface of this alluvial fan just south of Badwater.

From Badwater, it's not hard to see the evidence of the tectonic activity that formed the vast trough. In the picture above, two fault scarps are visible cutting across the relatively smooth profile of the alluvial fan. The earthquakes that caused these scarps happened in the last few thousand years, but they look fresh because of the lack of erosion in the dry climate.

Did we mention that Death Valley is also the driest place in North America? Average rainfall here is less than two inches a year. The Sierra Nevada and the other mountains of the Basin and Range province are very effective rain shadows (orographic barriers). Badwater lies at the edge of the Death Valley salt pan, a 200 square mile flat surface covered by salt and other evaporite minerals. It is hard to imagine a place more inhospitable to life on the planet. There are a few salt tolerant plants that grow on the edges of the pan, but I've heard of nothing that lives in the interior areas (except maybe some microbes here and there?).

To stand on the salt flat and look off in all directions is a lesson in isolation. Were it not for the vehicles and the ice chests and water bottles parked over against the mountain, this would be a moment of great concern. If it weren't February and summertime instead the concern would be near panic. We can easily forget the harsh nature of this environment when we are largely insulated from it. Furnace Creek, about a dozen miles north of this location, recorded a temperature of 134 °F (57 °C) in 1913. With the dethroning of the improperly recorded temperature in Libya from 1922, this is the hottest officially recorded temperature in world history. The hottest overnight temperature ever recorded, was 107 °F (42 °C) on July 12, 2012. That day, the average temperature was 117.5 °F (47.5 °C), the world's hottest 24-hours on record.

We talked about the geology and got back into the vans and headed north, up the valley towards Furnace Creek.

As we drove towards camp, we had a look at the edge of the vast turtleback fault surface at Badwater that forms the Proterozoic core of the Black Mountains (in the picture above). The long smooth slope in the shadow on the right is just about all fault surface. The sunlit rocks in the center  and on the left have slid off the fault to the north. They are composed of Miocene volcanic rocks of the Artist's Drive Formation.

The sunlight was a pleasant surprise. For much of the day the skies had been overcast, but in the latest part of the afternoon, the clouds parted for a moment and the rocks glowed orange and gold. The sediments and flows of the Artist's Drive formation are colored by oxidation of various metals in the volcanic ash and tuff layers, and are striking in almost any conditions, but they are especially bright at sunset.

The sun disappeared into the clouds again and the harsh edges of the valley blurred as the evening arrived. We headed back to our camp at Stovepipe Wells.

Out of the Valley of Death: Home from the road

Dantes View at Death Valley National Park

It's geology in the starkest terms. Death Valley is a place where the crust has been torn asunder, with valley floors lying below sea level next to peaks that reach 11,000 feet. Rocks here are rarely hidden by vegetation or soil. It's a land alien enough that George Lucas filmed parts of Star Wars here. It's a land that crushed the dreams of many people, and provided sanctuary for others.

The rocks of Death Valley record an unusually complete history extending from the early Proterozoic eon as much as two billion years ago to rocks that formed only a few centuries ago. It's hard to imagine a better place for teaching geology, and that's what I was doing over the last couple of days.

I bet no one has ever thought of taking a picture from this particular spot before!

The students were enthusiastic and curious, the weather was outstanding, and the scenery was on a grand scale. We'll explore some of the fascinating corners of this incredible landscape in the next few posts.

Some of the oldest rocks in the American west, metamorphosed around 1.7 billion years ago.