Tales from the Semi-Super-Bloom Tour, Part 1: The Mojave Desert and El Paso Mountains

A lot of excitement has been generated this year with the plentiful precipitation in the California Desert and the resulting "Super-Bloom". Mrs. Geotripper and I didn't want to totally miss out on the sights, but we didn't want to be in the midst of crowds that we knew would be present in the places in the news like Anza Borrego or Lake Elsinore. So we zeroed in on the part of the California desert that hasn't been in the news: the Owens Valley and Death Valley National Park.

We knew from the start that we might not see a great many flowers because most of the storms had tracked more to the south, but there had still been considerable precipitation, just a bit later than other parts of the desert. So with proper expectations in place, we set out on the road a week ago. The nice thing about low expectations is that you have a good chance to be pleasantly surprised, and we were. It wasn't the 'super-bloom', but it was colorful enough, so we dubbed our journey the "Semi-Super-Bloom Tour".

 The first place that made us pull over was a non-descript road junction on Highway 14 near Jawbone Canyon and the El Paso Mountains in the Mojave Desert. There were lots of small flowers on the desert floor, including Goldfields, Phacelia, Mallows and small Lilies (I welcome and expect corrections on flower identification).

The desert floor where we were traveling has been largely given over to utilitarian uses. In the immediate vicinity there are airports, military bases, and solar arrays, as well as the towns of California City and Mojave. There isn't much wilderness in this part of the desert.

The landscape is geologically interesting, as we were paralleling the Garlock fault, which divides the Mojave Desert from the Sierra Nevada and the Basin and Range Province. The fault is active, with forty miles of left-lateral offset, but it hasn't produced any historical earthquakes of consequence. The potential certainly exists.

Although the fault motion is primarily lateral, some warping and deformation has lifted a mountain range on the north side of the fault, the El Paso Mountains. The mountains are composed largely of older Paleozoic metamorphic rocks. The rocks had been quite deep in the crust, but were brought to the surface and eroded, and by around 12-15 million years ago had been eroded to a fairly flat surface. This surface was eventually covered by terrestrial sediments deposited in alluvial fans, grassy plains and ephemeral lakes that would remind a person of the African savannah. The comparison is apt, because the sediments contain fossils of a diverse fauna that included ancient camels, horses, antelope, elephants, and a number of predators including to the forerunners to our modern cats and canines.

The valley floor where we stopped certainly had flowers, but we could see that a real super-bloom was underway on the slopes of the El Paso Mountains off to the north. The usually dull gray slopes were covered in places with a veritable rainbow of flowers that must have including a great many poppies and lupines.

Our highway turned north, crossed the Garlock fault, and entered Red Rock Canyon State Park, which preserves the Neogene sediments containing the fossils mentioned above. Millions of people have seen Red Rock Canyon, but not necessarily in person. The brightly colored cliffs have been used as the backdrop for hundreds of Hollywood movies (they were the cliffs of 'Snakewater', Montana in the opening scenes of the original Jurassic Park).

We found that many of the Joshua Trees were blooming. The trees are a defining characteristic of the Mojave Desert and are found primarily in east California and portions of Arizona and Nevada. The trees are a potential victim of global warming. Their seeds once were spread in the scat of giant ground sloths during the last ice age, but the sloths are gone, and with the increasing heat, the trees (actually lilies) are unable to propagate up slopes where they can thrive. Ironically, the trees may disappear entirely in the national park that is named after them.

We left Red Rock Canyon and headed north on Highway 395 towards our turnoff to Death Valley at Owens Lake. Along the way we could see that the "foothills" of the Sierra Nevada were also bathed in color. We were headed to Fossil Falls and Red Hill, hoping to see what had changed in the six weeks since we were last there. That will be the subject of our next post...

Seeking the Savanna instead of Seas: "Saturday Night Live" and Geology??

Historical geology is a real head trip (remember that term?). Stick geologists in the desert against a cliff like the one above, and they will make a few observations, pick up a few stones (and/or fossils), and in their mind's eye, they will be exploring a long-ago prairie that would have looked much like the one in the picture below (a bit of the rarest ecosystem in California, the prairie at Merced National Wildlife Refuge).

There would be differences of course. This current-day prairie is populated by a diverse group of birds and small mammals like ground squirrels and rabbits. But it lacks some of the components of a healthy modern wild prairie, mainly the larger grazing animals like deer, antelope, and bison, and the large carnivores that would prey on them. Coyotes and foxes still inhabit the region, and cattle or sheep are sometimes brought onto the prairie to help maintain the quality of the grasslands. But the larger canines and cats, i.e. the wolves and the lions, are long gone, as are the bears.

We were on the first full day of our exploration of Death Valley National Park. We weren't there yet, because we had a hundred miles of Mojave Desert to cross before we reached the park. Along the way we made a stop at one of California's most spectacular state parks, Red Rock Canyon (not to be confused with the Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area outside of Las Vegas). Red Rock Canyon is on Highway 14 between the town of Mojave and Lone Pine, southeast of the Sierra Nevada. The place will look familiar to many, as the striking red and white cliffs have formed the backdrop to dozens if not hundreds of Hollywood movies (including some the opening scenes of the original Jurassic Park).

The plain hills to the south of our parking area (in the picture above) are composed of Paleozoic and older metamorphic rocks that have been displaced and uplifted along the Garlock Fault just south of the park. The rocks have been moved some forty miles from their original location by the left lateral movements of the fault zone. They have their own fascinating story, but what catches the eye are the much more colorful sedimentary layers that were deposited on the eroded surface of the metamorphic rocks between about 8 and 12.5 million years ago, a time period called the Miocene epoch.

For many of our students, this is the first real-world example of the basic principles of stratigraphy. We spent a few minutes talking about the birth of the science of geology in the observations of Nicolas Steno (superposition, lateral continuity, and original horizontality), and James Hutton (uniformitarianism). Then I unleashed them onto the rock exposures so they could evaluate the origins of the rocks and the sequence of events that produced the spectacular cliffs in front of us.

Understanding the changes of a prairie ecosystem through time is as easy as understanding "Saturday Night Live" (which for a fact might not be that easy). For more than forty years the underlying structure of the show has remained much the same; there's a guest host, there is a cold open ("It's Saturday Night!"), there are skits, there is the weekend news, there are fake ads, there are musical numbers. But cast is constantly in flux. There have been many people over the years who have filled in the niches: those who could mimic political figures, those who could act as the "straight man/woman", those who could sing. Sometimes the actors were so unmemorable that they disappeared without a trace after a few weeks or months. Others were successful, and remained for years. Others went on to greater things, like Hollywood movies. And that's how the prairie savanna has worked over the years.

Once our students have looked closely at the rocks, they've identified that there are fine layers representing deposition in lakes, other layers that formed on floodplains or alluvial fans. The terrestrial origin of many of the layers is supported by the bright red color, formed as iron in the rocks oxidized into natural rust. What we don't have time for (or permission for that matter) is a search for fossils, because it is the fossils that tell the fullest story of these rocks. Are these fossils the John Belushi-Dan Akroyd period of the grasslands? Or the Joe Piscopo-Eddie Murphy period? Or Kate McKinnon?

Grasses emerged as a dominant plant species in the middle of the Cenozoic period around 30-35 million years ago. The low-lying plants had a novel method of survival: instead of broad leaves easily chewed by forest-dwelling animals, the blades of grass incorporated silica into their structure, and the hard silica would soon destroy the teeth of most animals that tried to subsist on it. A general warming and drying of the world climate led to the expansion of the grasses at the expense of woodlands and tropical rainforests. Animals either adapted to the new conditions or went extinct. The early part of the Oligocene and early Miocene saw many changing species, especially in the horse clan. The ancestors of the horses were small browsers in the forests. As they adapted to the open grasslands, they became larger, and their feet went from three or four toes to hooves, which gave them great speed to escape predators. Their teeth evolved to grow throughout life, allowing them to survive nicely while grazing the grasslands.

The fossil-bearing rocks at Red Canyon are called the Dove Spring Formation (formerly the Ricardo Formation). The cast of characters are familiar in the sense that they fill the roles of many species on the prairies and wetlands today, but there were some unfamiliar characters as well. More than a hundred species of plants and animals have been found, making this one of the richest and most diverse fossil assemblages in the American West. They include the smallest mammalian members of the ecosystem such as mice, ground squirrels, rabbits and even a pika. The larger grazers were represented by ten (yes, ten) species of horse (compared to the three existing in the present day), four camel species, and three species of antelope. There were the surprising ones, two rhinoceros species, and two elephant ancestors (gomphotherium). The carnivores are represented by eight species of canine ancestors (some are called the "bone-crushing dogs"), and three species of felids (cats), including an early saber-tooth. There is a fair candidate for the ancestor of bears and dogs called a "bear dog" (Amphicyon). For a complete listing of the fossils found at Red Rock, check out this technical report from 2009.

So our investigation of an ancient savanna prairie revealed some of the early players in the drama that has played out across North America over millions of years. Some of the players (genera) were diverse and widespread but ultimately died out in North America (the horses and camels, rhinos and elephants). Other lineages survived, including the deer, the pronghorns, and predators like the wolves, coyotes, mountain lions, and foxes. The bears still lurk nearby in the mountains and would no doubt reoccupy the grasslands if the farms disappeared. Like "Saturday Night Live", the show continues and hasn't suffered cancellation, but a great many changes have taken place. The prairies of 12 million years ago can still be found in California today, but with a new cast and a different look.

A Place Where Water Once Was But Was No Longer, But Once Again Was - Travels in Death Valley

I'm finally not "liveblogging the deluge" anymore. I thought back at the beginning of January that I was monitoring a historic flood event that was going to be over with in just a few days. Somehow, new storms kept blowing through, and I was watching and monitoring flood activity around the state. Those "few days" turned into a six-week series of observations. But now that the storm activity has subsided a bit, the observations are going to be in the past tense. I didn't have much in the way of internet access over the holiday weekend, and we went and stared into the abyss of the storm with little to defend us but waterproof jackets and the nylon walls of our tents. We explored Death Valley National Park during one of its most intense storms of the year.

On the whole, we were pretty lucky. We got drenched by rainstorms on the first two nights of the trip, and rain played havoc with our travel plans during the first two days, but most of the principle roads in and around Death Valley remained open, and we were able to get to most of our objectives. The first day was certainly typical of this; we missed a planned fossil hunt because of the driving rain, but we managed stops at the other three localities, and even added two extra stops that weren't in the original plans. Our first stop was at Red Rock Canyon State Park near Mojave for a look at the colorful terrestrial deposits of the Ricardo (or Dove Springs) formation. If the exposures look familiar, you've probably seen them in a number of Hollywood movies. I've written extensively about the geology of Red Rock in the past; check out this post for some details of this fascinating place.

The real thrill of the day was to see water where water once was but was no longer, but once again was. Shall I explain?

During the Pleistocene Ice Ages between 2 million and 12,000 years ago, the climate of the northern hemisphere swung wildly from warm to cold and back to warm again, perhaps as many as twenty times. Ice accumulated across broad swaths of Canada and northern Europe, and several times crept across the border of the United States, ultimately covering around 30% of the lower 48 states. The thick ice cap never reached Oregon or California, but the Cascades and the Sierra Nevada developed an extensive network of alpine glaciers. Some streams of ice, for instance in the Tuolumne River basin, reached a length of 40 miles.

The glaciers of the Sierra Nevada never reached far into the desert basins to the east, but the influence of the cooler and wetter conditions was unmistakable. Meltwater filled the enclosed basins which then spilled over into adjacent basins, forming a series of what are now called pluvial lakes. Mono Lake is a small remnant of the glacial Lake Russell, and Owens Lake still contained water as recently as the 1920s (before Los Angeles diverted the incoming streams). Other lakes included China Lake, Searles Lake, Panamint, and ultimately Lake Manly in Death Valley. Vigorous fast-flowing rivers connected the widely separated lakes. Our second stop concerned one of those rivers, the one that flowed from Owens Lake to China Lake through the Indian Wells Valley.

From several hundred thousand years to as recently as 10,000 years ago, basaltic lava flowed from cinder cones and fissures of the Coso Volcanic Field. Some of these flows blocked the river, and formed a forty-foot high waterfall. The river scoured a channel, and the waterfall eroded in an upstream direction. Boulders trapped in river eddies swirled around, forming amazingly deep potholes. And then the ice receded. The level of Owens Lake dropped below the rim, and the river through what we call Fossil Falls ended.

The river ended thousands of years ago, but on rare occasions there is an echo of the days when a wild river flowed through the gorge. I've seen it only twice, but when the rains have been plentiful in the Owens Valley, a small stream of water flows through Fossil Falls. That's what we got to witness last week, thanks to the Bombogenesis storm (or Lucifer, or whatever they called it). A river the color of a creamy latte made its way through dark basalts.

It was a fine introduction to our exploration of the geology of the Death Valley region, and it wasn't the first time we were going to see water in places where water was not normally found. Death Valley is a place where the water once was, but was no longer, but once again was...

This last picture is kind of cheat. I didn't climb down into the gorge for a close up, so this is from 2005, the only other time I've seen water at Fossil Falls.

Cartoons Come to Life: The Value of Field Studies at Red Rock Canyon

I spend a lot of time in classrooms drawing cartoons. Lots of them, diagrammatically representing folds, faults and stratigraphy, trying to communicate to my students how these structures tell the story of the Earth. The problem for many of my students is that these are just cartoons. Cartoons on Saturday mornings (do ANY of you remember when that was the only time one got to watch cartoons?) do represent life in a way, but only if you have a real life to compare them to. And that's the problem for many students these days. They have no real-life experiences in the outdoors with which to compare these drawings.

And thus, the value of a field studies course. There is nothing quite like having the privilege of standing beneath a cliff, enjoying and appreciating the scenery, yes, but also being able to understand the story it tells. Our trip to Death Valley a few weeks ago included a fossil hunt at the first stop, but our second was a site where basic principles of geology stand out in stark relief, without a need for a chalkboard cartoon (I forgot the chalkboard this trip anyway). We had arrived at Red Rock Canyon State Park in the Mojave Desert. Just stepping out of the vehicles presented us a cliff face that was a physical representation of the diagram at the top of the post, a series of brightly colored layers of sand, siltstone and volcanic tuff transected by a fault.

The order of the layering provides a fine example of "superposition", the principle that layered rocks are stacked oldest to youngest, unless they have been overturned. This is one of the earliest principles of geology, described originally by Nicolas Steno in the 1600s. Looking east along the cliff we could also see the physical manifestation of another Steno principle, that of original horizontality. Most sedimentary environments produce horizontal strata (think floodplains or lakes, or shallow seas). If layers are tilted, some kind of force has acted on them, and being here in southern California, faults might be at fault.

A discussion of these basic principles was followed by a short "mapping" project. We weren't quite to the proficiency of working with maps, but the students set out to propose how they would organize the layers into formations and members that could be used to tell a logical story as to how these rocks could have come to have the structure and appearance they have today.

Red Rock Canyon does have a fascinating story as it turns out. The red and brown layers, called the Dove Springs Formation, record deposition of silt and sand in river floodplains and ephemeral lakes between 12.5 to 7.5 million years ago. The semiarid savanna environment supported a diverse ecosystem that included extinct elephants (gomphotherium), ancestral rhinos, three-toed horses, giraffe-like camels, saber-toothed cats, and bone-crushing ancestors to the bears and dogs. There are also numerous smaller fossils like ancestral skunks, alligator lizards, and shrews, with a total plant and animal species count of more than one hundred. The ecosystem suffered the occasional catastrophe as it was buried by volcanic ash. Basaltic lava flowed across the region.

One of the student's discoveries was a somewhat less visible fault that shifted the layers. It was a great introduction into the mind of field geologists, seeing the world the way earth scientists do. It was an interesting spot, but there were many more to come on the road ahead.

Speaking of roads and cartoons come to life...here's the Roadrunner (pic is actually from Joshua Tree National Park)....

...and Wiley E. Coyote. Despite living in the most desolate driest place in North America, it looks like this one has actually caught a few roadrunners! Seriously, this coyote lives only a few miles from Badwater, the hottest and lowest part of Death Valley.

Barren Cliffs Reveal a Rich and Violent Past: Red Rock Canyon State Park

Deserts have such a fearsome reputation around the world, but deserts can be both beautiful and at certain times of the year a pleasant place to visit. The dry lands of the American Southwest are no exception. For geologists, the treat is made better by the marvelous exposures of barren rock that tell stories of the past when the landscape was very different. This is one of those places: Red Rock Canyon State Park in California. We paid a visit on our way to Death Valley a few weeks ago.

The Garlock fault cuts across the boundary between the Basin and Range province and the Mojave Desert, forming a high linear ridge called the El Paso Mountains. Erosion has stripped away the alluvial cover, exposing the underlying continental sedimentary rocks. The rocks, candy-striped in tones of red, pink and white, formed in a deep basin between 12.5 to 7.5 million years ago, accumulating to a depth of more than a mile. The sediments include arkosic sandstone, siltstone, shale, along with volcanic ash and lava flows recorded several dozen eruptive events. The environment was perhaps semiarid, but certainly wetter than the current day. The fossil record suggests an Upper Sonoran paleobotanical zone, with Black Locust, Mexican pinyon pine, cypress, California live oak, red-root, acacia, desert thorn and palm. Similar plants are found today in the high mountain ridges between San Jacinto and Santa Rosa Peaks in southern California (a region I explored often in my youth).

The steep cliffs have attracted filmmakers for decades, making appearances in all manner of movies, including a lot of westerns, and one of my favorites, the opening scenes of "Jurassic Park".  But instead of dinosaurs, paleontologists have discovered a treasure trove of late Cenozoic mammals, reptiles, amphibians, and birds. More than 100 species have been found thus far.

What kinds of animals lived in the western North America around 10 million years ago? It was a diverse ecosystem with many unexpected species for those who think that deer, antelope and buffalo cover all the bases. Thanks to David Whistler, we have a rather comprehensive list of the animals who lived here.

On the open plains, one would have seen two different rhino species, ten species of horse, four kinds of camels, three antelope species, two elephant-like gomphotheres, vultures, two large land tortoises, pika, two ground squirrel species, deer mice, and rabbits. 

In the brush covered woodlands, one would have found two oreodonts (extinct sheep-like animals), peccary, three-toed browsing horse, short-legged camel, ringtailed cat, skunk, two weasel-like animals, wolverine,  four distinctly different spiny lizards, night lizard, rosy boa, racer snakes, hedgehog, chipmunk, two gopher-like rodents, two different pocket mice, a bat, three small perching birds, mole, four different shrews, a small, rear-fanged snake, and two alligator lizard species.

This rich selection of plant eating animals represented a huge source of walking protein, so there were predators, lots of them. There were six different species of canids (ancestors to the wolves, foxes, and coyotes), a very large bear-like animal, and three large ancestors to the cats including a an early form of sabertooth.

We spent our time learning the basics of stratigraphy, practiced a rudimentary form of geologic mapping, and interpreted the environment of deposition from the nature of the sediments exposed in the cliff. I wandered between groups of working students, answering questions, but my eyes kept ranging across the cliffs, thinking how incredible it is that we live in a time when we can discern the past history of our planet, and in so doing, understanding how we came to be. We are both a part of the Earth's ecosystem, and yet exist outside that ecosystem (for better or worse).

This rich variety of animals in Miocene time occurred because the climate provided rich sources of food, and diversity of the ecosystem was the result. Today, if a climate is not to our liking, we alter the ecosystem to our own ends. We build our shelters, we travel in little cocoons with air-conditioning and stereophonic sound, and we import vast amounts of resources and fuels to maintain our chosen lifestyle. We tend to ignore the other elements of the ecosystem where we live and visit. We don't embrace our environment, we cut ourselves off from it. It's when I'm in a place like Red Rock that I am reminded of where we come from, our ultimate heritage. We are children of the Earth. And there are limits.

Defining Irony: Welcome to One of the Few Parts of California Not Suffering Extreme Drought

The bottom of Death Valley is the driest place in North America, and the hottest place in the world. It might stand to reason that it is a place that withstands the effects of California's horrific four-year drought, which is true, but it's not necessary this year. Death Valley is one of the few parts of the state that is running close to normal in the precipitation department.

Source: http://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/Home/StateDroughtMonitor.aspx?CA

In fact, based on what we saw on our trip to Death Valley last week, this may be a very good year for wildflowers. There were some good storms in December that dropped around an inch of rain in the region, and a later storm dropped another half inch, giving a jump start to seedlings that were starting to grow. An inch and a half constitutes a near-normal rain year in Death Valley!

Photo by Mrs. Geotripper

There were green shoots covering many of the slopes in the Mojave Desert and Death Valley when we visited on the 13th through the 16th. Only a few of the flowers had bloomed, but another week or two and the desert should be coming alive with color.

Sand Verbena on an alluvial fan below Jubilee Pass in southern Death Valley

It's fairly rare for us to see a true flower show on our mid-February trips, but conditions were extraordinary in 1997 and 2005, and I will never forget the color explosion we saw at those times. But enough flowers were present to keep things interesting for us when we weren't observing the rocks.

My guess? Arizona Popcorn Flower

I am not at all good at flower identification, so I expect my good friend Jon Mark Stewart will quickly correct my mistakes. He is the author of Mojave Desert Wildflowers and Colorado Desert Wildflowers, two indispensable guides for desert travelers and flower lovers.

My guess: Yellow Peppergrass

We saw a fair number of flowers at Red Rock Canyon State Park in the Mojave Desert, including the Popcorn Flower and Yellow Peppergrass (above). Red Rock is one of California's gems, familiar to many because of its use as a movie set for all manner of westerns, and at least one "recent" movie: Jurassic Park.

I have no idea...

One of the best early season flower sites in Death Valley is the alluvial fan that extends down to the valley from Jubilee Pass at the south end of the valley. Although the road is paved (it travels from the village of Shoshone to Badwater and on to Furnace Creek), it is far less used by tourists and is usually quiet. We make several important geological stops along this stretch, including a traverse of some of the formations of the Late Proterozoic Pahrump Group. The rocks are around a billion years old, and record the continental divergence that eventually produced the Pacific Ocean.

My guess is Little Gold Poppy

The Sand Verbena and poppies were in evidence, as well as the first outliers of the Desert Sunflower aka Desert Gold. This is a site where we have seen incredible flower displays.

I would dearly love to reach Death Valley in another week or two. Darn work and all that!

The picture below was most certainly not what we saw last week. It dates from 2005 when prodigious amounts of rain (and snow!) fell in the Death Valley region, including a lot that fell on us during our trip. Even at this, the season was early and more flowers bloomed in later weeks. It was quite a year.