Scenes from a Superbloom: Death Valley 2016 (Part 1 of 2)

I could have made up a detailed geological description of the geology of this alluvial plain at the south end of the Death Valley graben. This is a geology blog, after all. But we were there in the middle of February during the most extraordinary flower show, a "superbloom", in a decade. A series of fall storms were spaced just well enough to wake up the myriads of seeds that hide in the soil, biding their time and waiting for the right conditions to bloom. And this was the time. I'm showing flowers today!

First and foremost is the Desert Five Spot (Eremalche rotundifolia). I'm in Death Valley every year during February, and I might see a few flowers scattered about even in dry years, but I only find the Five Spots during years like this, and I have almost no good pictures of them. That changed this year!

The slopes were covered with Desert Gold (Geraea canescens). A few Desert Golds seem to sprout in the dry years, but if there is water, these are the flowers that turn the slopes and fans bright yellow. It almost feels like walking through alpine meadows, yet one can never escape the sense that these flowers are growing as fast as they can, setting seeds, and dying as the hot winds begin to blow (and the hot winds can come at any time of the year).

Another dependable flower even in drier years is the Desert Sand Verbena (Abronia villosa). There were lots of them in the washes at Ashford this year.

The Ashford Mill was built to process gold ores from a mine a few miles away in the Black Mountains. A bit of gold was produced over the years, but the total output was described as providing the owners with little more than "groceries and lawsuits". Not much is left beyond a few walls and foundations, but they provide a decent frame for viewing Telescope Peak.

The Black Mountains form the eastern wall of the south part of Death Valley, and they are one of the most rugged mountain ranges to be found anywhere. The steepness results from the rapid uplift of the mountains (or rapid subsidence of the valley floor, or both), and the slow rate of erosion in the exceedingly dry climate of eastern California. In this season of "plenty" (in the relative sense, of course), they provide a somber backdrop to the rich display of flowers across the valley floor.

In the next post, we'll check out a few other flowers from another spot just up the highway.

The Age of a Mountain versus the Age of (the rocks of) a Mountain: Arriving in Death Valley National Park

Death Valley is the largest national park in the lower 48 states, and in fact is bigger than several states. It preserves some of the most spectacular corners of the Basin and Range province, a region that extends from eastern California, all of Nevada, and half of Utah. The park includes the lowest place in North America, the hottest place in the world, some of the greatest relief in North America (the difference between the highest and lowest points, over 11,000 feet), and some of the rarest and most endangered animals (the pupfish and others). And awe-inspiring scenery!

We entered Death Valley from the west, driving over the Darwin Plateau at the south end of the Inyo Mountains. Just beyond the summit we stopped briefly at the Father Crowley Vista Point, which overlooks a deep desert valley that isn't Death Valley. It's Panamint Valley, another faulted basin only a bit less deep than Death Valley itself. The setting sun highlighted the rocks exposed across the valley in the Panamint Mountains. Thousands of feet of limestone and sandstone were visible, exposing evidence of more than 100 million years of quiet deposition of mud and sand on the western margin of the North American continent during the Paleozoic Era

It was a good moment to draw a contrast between the age of a mountain range and the age of the rocks exposed within the mountain range. These are two different things. The rocks of the Panamint Mountains formed over a  period of many hundreds of millions of years, but the mountains themselves are very young (geologically). Lava flows on top of the now separated mountain ranges show that they were once connected, and that the valleys could only have formed in the last few million years. The Panamint Mountains are one of the youngest mountain ranges on the planet! By comparison, the Rocky Mountains are around 50 million years old (with some recent rejuvenation), and the Appalachians are 300 million years old (with a complex story that played out over tens of millions of years). India began slamming into Asia 40 million years ago, forming the Himalayas. The earliest Hominids, had they cared to, could have seen Death Valley before it became an actual valley.

As the shadows lengthened, we crossed Towne Pass at 4,956 feet (1,511 meters), and descended the long grade to our our sea level camp at Stovepipe Wells. We had reached the actual Death Valley. Would there be geology? Would there be flowers? Stay tuned!

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.

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.

The Harrowing Journey to the Valley of Death (21st Century Style)

When is the next bathroom? Will there be flush toilets at the campground? What about showers?

Geology field tripping in Death Valley National Park in the modern era is a far cry from the adventures of centuries past, specifically the 19th and 20th (the earth scientists living among the Native Americans in past centuries left no record, but they no doubt knew which rocks and minerals were valuable for tool making). In the 19th century the "earth scientists" were the few itinerant miners and prospectors looking for other kinds of valuable minerals, especially gold and silver (though the most valuable finds were probably the borates and talc). Just getting to the gigantic blank spot on the map was a challenge, and surviving in the harsh climate was a gamble.

At the beginning of the 20th century, access was improving, and rough dirt roads coursed up many of the valleys and crossed the less rugged passes of the mountain ranges. These roads were utilized by the first of the university-trained geologists who undertook the daunting task of mapping the Death Valley region. It wasn't that the rocks weren't exposed well. They offer some of the best exposures to be found anywhere. But the Basin and Range Province is so vast the few individuals who first worked in the region were limited simply by time and mortality. There was hardly enough time in one life to see it all!

By the 1930s, mining roads made for much better access, and the designation of Death Valley as a national monument by Herbert Hoover in 1933 led to increased tourist traffic. The mines began converting their hospitality facilities to tourist destinations, particularly at Furnace Creek. Paved highways allowed for quick trips out of Las Vegas or the Los Angeles region, and Death Valley began to feel just a little bit "urbanized". But not really. It can be easy to forget that this land is still the same harsh climate that it's been for the last few thousand years since the end of the ice ages. The heat and dryness can still lead to heat stroke and dehydration, and all it takes to bring one to the edge of mortality is a blown radiator hose or flat tire.

And so it was that we were making our way into the "Valley of Death" for our geology field studies class a couple of weeks ago. We had already searched for fossils at Sharktooth Hill, learned the basics of stratigraphy at Red Rock Canyon, and explored a dry ice age waterfall at Fossil Falls, but it was time to head east out of the Owens Valley and into one of the most isolated regions of the lower forty-eight states. We first crossed the relatively muted topography of the Darwin Plateau at the south end of the Inyo Range (top picture), and then took the Mr. Toad's Wild Ride down the steep highway to Panamint Springs and Panamint Valley. We made a short stop at the Father Crowley Vista Point (above). This site used to be a wide dirt lot on the side of the highway, but has been developed into a formal vista point with a simple toilet facility and protective fencing (gotta keep them tourists from falling over the cliffs...). The view is stupendous, with an excellent vista of the Panamint and Cottonwood Mountains across the way. There are complex relationships between the rocks of the Panamints, which are hinted at in the picture below, where dark flows of basaltic lava cover intensely folded Paleozoic carbonate rocks. The hill beyond exposes a granitic pluton.

The bottom of Panamint Valley holds more recent geologic phenomena, including the Panamint dune field and a fault scarp along the mountain base (the sunlit terrace)....

 ...and Panamint Dry Lake (below). Telescope Peak, the highest point in the park at 11,049 feet, is often graced by snow during the winter months. On the other side of the Panamint Range is Death Valley itself, which in large part lies at a depth of several hundred feet below sea level. Not many places around the world have such great relief.

From the Panamint Valley at about 1,000 feet we began climbing to cross the Panamint Mountains over Towne Pass at 4,956 feet, and in the setting sun we followed the long grade down the alluvial fan system to Stovepipe Wells at sea level. We pulled into the campground at dusk under a beautiful fiery sky.

 As the western sky faded, the light grew in the east as the full moon rose above the Funeral Range.

We had reached the Valley of Death, and it was a beautiful place. And there were flush toilets and showers!

Death Valley Days: The Fourth Day - The Long Road Home

Day dawns on the Cottonwood Mountains west of Stovepipe Wells. We've got about 400 miles to reach home, but we weren't going to let that stop us from doing a few last minute stops at Death Valley National Park. We've spent three days exploring the region (here, here and here), successfully avoiding the worst of California's storms this last weekend, and seeing some wonderful geology.

Tucki Mountain is an immense edifice rising 8,000 above our camp at Stovepipe Wells at sea level. The shape of the mountain is reminiscent of a turtleback fault, and it may in fact be an incompletely exposed metamorphic core complex (I would love to hear from the structural geologists about it). Mosaic Canyon is a deep gorge on the north flank that narrows down to a twisting labyrinth in its lower reaches. It is a main tourist stop, but most visitors never notice the spectacularly exposed structural features.

Just a short distance up the canyon from the parking lot is one of the best exposed examples of a normal fault I can imagine. Laura is resting her back on the headwall and sitting, more or less, on the footwall. The different colored layers show that the headwall dropped relative to the footwall, indicating extensional stress.

A little further up the canyon, the so-called 'mosaics' appear, chunks and pieces of canyon alluvium that were lithified, glued to the canyon walls, and exposed by continued downward erosion of the canyon. The photo above would serve as a perfect example of the appearance of an angular unconformity (a buried erosion surface with tilted rocks beneath and horizontal layers above), although the specific relationships here stretch the definition a little bit.

Paul was describing a large recumbent fold in the upper part of the narrows. These rocks have undergone an astounding amount of deformation, having been twisted into tight folds multiple times.

We made our way down the canyon for one last restroom break and chance for curios and t-shirts, and starting winding our way up into the Panamint Mountains for a last look at the valley. The road down the Mosaic Canyon fan provided a marvelous view of the Death Valley Dunes (Mesquite Dunes). Contrary to many people's stereotypes about deserts, dunes are a relatively rare part of the landscape in a place like Death Valley. Powerful winds blow the sands off the alluvial fans and down the long valleys until some flank of a mountain range interrupts the flow of the wind. The sand is deposited and shifts back and forth in the wind eddies. The highest of the dunes reach 150 feet or so. They are especially fascinating at night and in the twilight hours. In the morning the surfaces are covered by trackways of insects and animals. Most people don't realize they have seen the dunes; they were a stand-in for the Star Wars planet of Tantooine (the Dante's View panorama of Death Valley was used for the setting of Mos Eisley).
The interruption of the fan in the far distance is the trace of the Furnace Creek fault, a strike-slip fault that follows the base of the Funeral Mountains on the skyline. Death Valley hasn't been historically active as far as earthquakes go, but there are many signs that the faults are quite active.
We drove up the gravel road to Aguereberry Point. The gentle rolling landscape gave little indication of the jagged cliffs just over the ridgetop. These hills give some indication of the topography of the region prior to the formation of the deep fault grabens of Death Valley and Panamint Valley. They were preserved as the mountains rose and valley collapsed, but in the fullness of geologic time, the hills will be breached by headward erosion and will disappear.

We topped the ridge at 6,000 feet and arrived at Aguereberry Point. Being at the end of a gravel road, it receives far fewer visitors than Dante's View, but it is no less spectacular. One stands beneath the flank of 11,049 foot Telescope Peak, and has a sweeping 270 degree view of Death Valley, the Panamint Mountains, the Inyo Mountains, and the Sierra Nevada in the far distance. At our feet was the massive alluvial fan of Furnace Creek, the location of many of the park's tourist facilities.

The salt flats of Badwater and the Black Mountains fill the view to the southeast. In the foreground are tilted Paleozoic sediments, carbonates and sandstones that were deposited in shallow seas, but ultimately accumulated to depths of many thousands of feet. We were standing on quartzite that was once a beach in Cambrian time 500 million years ago. We could see the burrows made by countless worms in the tropical climate.

Finally the last geology stop was complete, and we hit the long road home, via Trona, Ridgecrest, Bakersfield and Fresno. It was a good trip! I hope you've enjoyed the virtual tour.

Death Valley Days: The Second Day - We Dodge a Bullet

The biggest, baddest storms still find heartbreak in the barren jagged peaks of the Basin and Range Province, and especially Death Valley. Last night we awaited the onslaught of winds and a 100% chance of rain, but the mountain barriers of the Panamint and Cottonwood Mountains absorbed most of the storm's moisture, and we had just a spritz of rain in our camp at Stovepipe. Furnace Creek got a bit more, 0.14 inches, but all in all we dodged a very big bullet, aside from some inconveniently heavy winds that destroyed one of the student's tents overnight. Morning arrived with a wonderful moonset over the Cottonwoods.

As we hit the road, we realized the storm really was past, as sunshine lit up the Panamint Mountains on the east side of Death Valley. If you are noticing the snow, it's not an unusual occurrence in the park, considering the Panamints top out at over 11,000 feet in elevation. The valley floor in the foreground of the picture is below sea level. Death Valley has some of the highest relief of any place in the United States (the difference between the highest and lowest points). The rugged slopes are composed of Paleozoic and Proterozoic sedimentary rocks, mostly carbonates, with a healthy mix of intrusive granites and older metamorphic rocks

It would be inaccurate to say that the flower blooms have started in earnest, but we found a few here and there, and they added a nice splash of color to the desert.

We made stops at some fault exposures east of the park near Shoshone (the 'Charlie Brown outcrop'), and headed over the Black Mountains into the southern reaches of the Death Valley graben. We checked out the Amargosa Chaos exposures at Exclamation Point, the Pahrump Group near Ashford Mills, the fault scarps, offset cinder cone and wave cut terraces near Shoreline Butte, and I took...no pictures! I was busy...eh...teaching and stuff.

We made a stop at Mormon Point and took in a couple of Death Valley's enigmatic features, the turtleback faults. These are massive dome-shaped fault surfaces whose origins are debated, but they are composed of deep crustal rocks that have been metamorphosed into gneiss and schist. The rugged exposures reveal collisions of land masses around 1.7 billion years ago, and are the oldest rocks in the park.

Mudflows and flashfloods have scattered large boulders of the ancient rock across the valley floor and are a treat to explore. One huge boulder (below) contained huge crystals of black hornblende 3-4 inches long.

We of course had to do the touristy thing and visited the lowest point in the western hemisphere at Badwater. The actual lowest point is out on the salt flats a mile or two away, but what's a foot or two between friends? People were walking out onto the freshest salt exposures.

The afternoon sun was sinking fast, but we had one more thing we wanted to do...

It's also a touristy thing too, but we wanted to see the flaming colors of the sunset on the Artists Palette. We drove up Artist Drive as fast as we were able, and we didn't quite get to the Palette, but we did stop and get a nice panorama of the other volcanic rocks at the north end of the Black Mountains.

Conditions are a lot calmer tonight, so hopefully no rain or heavy winds. Two nights of that and I'll have a tired class, and we have lots of great stuff to do tomorrow!