Traversing Dark Canyons Where the Mountains are Upside-down: Titus Canyon Road, Death Valley

This is lonely country. There are no outposts of civilization, no phone service, and a single thin gravel road winds through the complex of canyon narrows. This is the kind of country where canyons and peaks get named for the people who disappeared there, rather than for their discoveries.  It's been 110 years since prospector Morris Titus went missing while searching for supplies for his party. The canyon now bears his name.

The serpentine road that passes through the Grapevine Mountains by way of Titus Canyon was constructed to provide access to the town of Leadfield, but the mining venture never amounted to anything, and the town was abandoned in less than a year. The road was kept open when Death Valley was declared a national monument by President Herbert Hoover, and today it is one of the most popular backcountry roads in the park. But that doesn't make it any less spooky, especially when it is late in the day and the sun is setting low on the horizon.

In places, the canyon has cut 3,000 feet into the heart of the mountain range, and the preponderance of limestone cliffs gives the gorge a ruggedness reminiscent of the Grand Canyon in Arizona. The rocks are of similar age, dating from the Paleozoic Era. But Titus Canyon has an attribute that is missing in the Grand Canyon: the rocks here are upside down.

Let's get an explanation...

Death Valley and the Basin and Range Province are largely the result of extensional forces dating from the last 15-20 million years. The crust was stretched and broken up into horsts and grabens, and earthquakes today still mostly reflect the heritage of the intense stretching of the earth's crust. It wasn't always that way. For something like 200 million years, the region was  under the influence of compressional forces, courtesy of the massive subduction zone that once existed off the California coast (it still exists to the north as the Cascadia Subduction Zone). As the ocean crust sank beneath the edge of the North American continent, the rocks that had originally formed the passive continental margin were pushed skyward and intensely folded. In places the folds literally turned the rocks upside down.

That's the case in the western part of the Grapevine Mountains, which are crossed by the road through Titus Canyon. The rocks slope into the ground towards the east, but because they are inverted, driving west takes the traveler through younger and younger rocks. You can even see the fold itself, a recumbent anticline, in a few spots (see the picture below). The rocks in the foreground are upside down, while those on the far summit above are right-side up (although all of the rocks are tilted steeply).

Because the Death Valley graben has been sinking through time, the valley is deeper and more narrow towards the edge of the range, since the river gradient is steeper and erosion faster. The narrows of Titus Canyon are memorable, being barely wide enough to accommodate the vans. Most of the students got out and walked the last mile (in the dark), because the canyon is so scenic in the lower reaches.

The rocks we were walking through date back to more than 500 million years ago, to Cambrian time. They are part of the Bonanza King formation, a limestone unit that was deposited in a warm shallow sea along the edge of North America. The animals that lived here included trilobites, a diverse group of arthropods related to Horseshoe Crabs and believe it or not, pill-bugs (roly-poly to some of you). Some trilobites could roll up in the manner of pill-bugs. There were also coral-like archaeocyathids, an ancient animal that was one of the first groups to go extinct. Think of them as a failed experiment in early life (although they were widespread and very common for a time). Brachiopods were another group found as fossils in these rocks. They are bivalved animals like the clams, but their anatomy is more primitive than a clam, if that is possible. They achieved great diversity during the Paleozoic period, but only a few species persist in today's seas (the living species are sometimes called Lampshells). There were a great many other species living in the ancient seas, but few of them had hard shells, and were thus very rarely preserved as fossils.

It can sometimes be difficult to imagine the forces that are required to turn mountains upside-down, and it's even more impressive to realize that the deformation actually took place thousands of feet, even miles deep in the crust. There was once an earlier mountain range in this place that rose to great height as a result of the compression. The mountains eventually eroded to a fairly gentle plain, only to be disrupted by extensional forces in the last 20 million years, resulting the mountains that we see today only a few million years ago. Canyons like the lower end of Titus have formed only the last few hundred thousand years.

We walked the last few yards of Titus Canyon, and emerged at the top of the massive alluvial fan built by debris washing out of the narrows. After being in dark canyons for hours, the expansive views were a shock. Way out in the distance to the left was Tucki Mountain, and at the base was the only outpost of civilization for many miles, at Stovepipe Wells. Poor Morris Titus made it out of the canyon, but it was July, and he had no water. He was doomed. Sometimes we can forget how much technology can shield us from the harsh world. We unconcernedly jumped into the vans, hoping there would still be enough hot water in the showers, and that they still be serving dinner in the restaurant.

Titus Canyon is one of the premier adventures at Death Valley National Park. High clearance cars and SUVs are recommended, and it's always a good idea to travel with others. It may be a delightful exploration of a few hours, but things can go wrong, so it's good to be with friends (my favorite t-shirt in recent years came from Death Valley; it said "Bring a compass! It's always awkward when you have to eat your friends.")!

The Richest Mineral Resources in Death Valley: Isolation and Gullibility

A great many dreams lie broken in the rock and gravel expanses of Death Valley National Park. The California Gold Rush had brought hundreds of thousands of people to the state in the 1850s, and though few of them ever actually became rich, there was always the hope of the next big mother lode was somewhere out there in the wastelands that lay east of the Sierra Nevada. Hungry miners fanned out from the Sierra Nevada Mother Lode in a sometimes desperate search for riches in the desert.

Sometimes there was success, most notably at Bodie and Cerro Gordo, and at the Comstock Lode in Virginia City, Nevada. But most of the time the miners came up empty. And sometimes worse. Morris Titus was a prospector in 1906 who lost his life somewhere in the depths of the canyon that now bears his name. It's also the canyon we are exploring today in this blog post.

There will always be people with more money than they know what to do with, and they will always want more of it. And there will always be other people devising ways to separate such people from their money. Why put your life and health at risk in a hard country when you can just as easily succeed by convincing others to do the work and take the risks for you?

Such was the story of Leadfield in Titus Canyon. Off to the east, the town of Rhyolite had a mildly successful run as a gold mining town, lasting from 1905 to 1911, so the idea of a new discovery of ore was not unexpected. Some ores of lead may have actually existed in the area. But transporting those ores would be a problem. They needed to be taken to Beatty, Nevada, 20 miles as the crow flies, but crows don't live in Death Valley. They needed to take the ores through the narrows of Titus Canyon (often closed by flash floods) down into Death Valley, over Daylight Pass, and then to Beatty, a distance of 70 miles. And the ores really weren't all that valuable. If anyone was going to get rich from mining at Leadfield, they needed a different approach. Enter the entrepreneur Charles Julian (entrepreneur in this instance translates to "con-man").

The most valuable resource of Leadfield was isolation (of the town) and gullibility (of the investors). Rich investors tend to live in cities, and know little of geology. They are the kind of people who could be convinced that the ores at Leadfield would be transported down the canyon to paddlewheel steamers on the floor of fricking Death Valley, the driest place in North America (sorry for the near-profanity). This was an actual insinuation made by the promotional materials for the "boom" town.

The promoters of the town hacked out a road directly from Beatty to Leadfield (It's now Titus Canyon Road, the one we followed on our tour), and in March of 1926, more than 300 potential investors and hundreds of local miners crowded the site of the new town, and Leadfield was born. A post office was established in August of 1926, and it closed for good five months later. The town, which for several months boasted a population of 300, was deserted in less than a year. And Julian had disappeared with a lot of money (he died by his own hand only a few years later in Shanghai at the age of 40). Lots of gold and silver had been produced (from the pockets of the investors). Not an ounce of actual ore was ever shipped.

I wonder sometimes what life was like in a town founded on fraud and hopeful dreams. What did people do? They opened stores, hotels, and blacksmith shops, and I guess people sort of milled around wondering where to dig. At what point did people start to realize they had been conned? Those were my thoughts as we explored the handful of structures that still remain. Someone had dug a fairly extensive shaft, but I found not a trace of galena or any other lead-bearing minerals in the tailings.

It's nice to know that we live in a day and age when nobody could ever be swayed into investing in shady mining operations on the basis of slickly produced promotional materials. Surely such things don't happen today...if you agree, well, have I got a proposal for you...

Why yes, this 13 pound gold nugget came from my mine. How could you doubt me???

For an account of Leadfield's history, check out the 1957 article by the late great California travel writer Russ Leadabrand: http://www.dezertmagazine.com/mine/1957DM01/index.html.

A Single "Moment" in Geologic Time: A Finder of Lost Worlds in Death Valley

Red Pass in the Grapevine Mountains, Titus Canyon Road

Death Valley is one of the premier paleontology parks in the entire National Park system. There is a stunningly complete record of fossil-bearing strata extending over nearly a billion years, including rocks from every period of the Paleozoic era (543-251 million years ago). The Paleozoic era was a critical period of Earth's history, having seen the first appearance of most of the most important (i.e., diverse and common) animals and plants. There were the marine invertebrates like the brachiopods, corals, bryozoans, gastropods, cephalopods, pelycypods, and graptolites. There were the first fish, the first amphibians, and the first reptiles. There was the first invasion of the land by plants and animals. In fact, the only major groups that didn't evolve in Paleozoic time were dinosaurs, birds and mammals. 

Outcrop of the Titus Canyon Formation along Titus Canyon Road

Even the Grand Canyon is missing vast swaths of geologic time from the Paleozoic, including the entire Ordovician and Silurian periods.  Death Valley is truly unique, but when we start a discussion of the next two geologic eras, Death Valley is lacking in some respects. The thing is, if we are going to see exposures of the oldest rocks, rocks that are usually buried deep in the crust, than something has to happen to bring them to the surface. At Death Valley, only one layer can be found from the Mesozoic era (251-65 million years), and it's from the earliest period, the Triassic. There are Jurassic and Cretaceous rocks, but they are intrusive in nature, having formed deep in the crust from molten magma (granite and related rocks). Although dinosaurs and early mammals no doubt roamed the landscape many miles above, no record remains of their existence at Death Valley, as the rocks were uplifted and eroded away long ago.

Exposures of the Titus Canyon formation

The situation is the same for the Cenozoic era (65 million years to the present). In most parts of the park, Cenozoic rocks can be found, but none are more than 14 million years old. In other words, there is a gap of well over two hundred million years at Death Valley for which no fossil records can be found. Except for a single moment in time 34 million years ago...

Titus Canyon Road above Titanothere Canyon

Death Valley was proclaimed as a national monument in 1933 by the only U.S. president who had a career as a geologist, Herbert Hoover. A newly graduated geologist named H. Donald Curry was appointed as the first ranger/naturalist at the park. In his role, he provided evening programs for park visitors and did research during the day. He mapped large areas of the park, and was the first to describe the enigmatic turtleback surfaces that led to the discovery of an entirely new kind of fault, the detachment fault.

Upper Titus Canyon at Red Pass

Some blasting was being done to clear a road to Leadfield and down Titus Canyon. Curry noticed the rocks in the upper canyon were sedimentary, and that a skull was exposed in one of the roadcuts. It turned out to be the first discovery of a Titanothere west of the Rocky Mountains, and an entirely new species to boot (it's now called Protitanops curryi, after Curry). Further work revealed numerous other fossils as well, including Mesohippus (one of the earliest of horses), Colodon (a species of tapir), Teletaceras (a primitive Rhinoceros), Protoreodon (extinct species of artiodactyl, distantly related to modern cows, deer, pigs, and camel), and Leptomeryx (a small deer-like ruminant). Other fossils included early species of rodent, fish, and turtles.

Titanothere (Source: Wikipedia)

In other words, Curry had stumbled across a snapshot of a single moment in time that provides us a look at the world that existed after the dinosaurs had been extirpated. Mammals were working themselves into dominance of the rapidly changing terrestrial environments of the early Cenozoic era (they were in a rather intense competition for a time with the birds). That these sediments were preserved at all is lucky, as rocks of similar age are found nowhere else in the region. Somehow the so-called Titus Canyon formation was not eroded even though all the rocks dating from the time of the dinosaurs had disappeared, as well as those from the first thirty million years of the Cenozoic era. It would be another twenty million years before other sedimentary rocks would be preserved in the Death Valley region (the Artist Drive formation, 14 million years ago).

Mesohippus, an early horse species found in the Titus Canyon formation of Death Valley (from Wikipedia)

The Titus Canyon formation is composed of conglomerate, sandstone, calcareous mudstone, algal limestone, and tuffaceous sandstone, preserving what once was a savanna environment with adjacent forests. Although rocks like the Titus Canyon aren't found elsewhere in Death Valley, rocks of similar age are found in southern California (the Sespe formation), and west of the Sierra Nevada in the Great Valley (Ione formation).

The type specimen of the Protitanops curryi. A replica was on display for many years in the Death Valley National Park visitor center Source: Researchgate

This has been part of an off and on series about our February visit to Death Valley National Park. We were following the gravel road that crosses the Grapevine Mountains and descends through Titus Canyon. The road is accessible by most cars, though high clearance is recommended, and travel is definitely not recommended in bad weather (the road passes through a narrow canyon in the lower reaches). From here, we were about to pass through an upside-down mountain range!

Out of the Valley of Death and into an Upside Down Mountain

The Grapevine Mountains form the eastern margin of the Death Valley north of Stovepipe Wells, reaching elevations of nearly 9,000 feet in places. It's an imposing range, stark, barren, and rugged. All of the mountains of Death Valley are rugged pretty much by default, but erosion has not pierced deeply into many of them. They're too young geologically to have been affected much by mudflows and flashfloods in this arid environment.

There are exceptions to everything though, and there is a canyon that practically cleaves the Grapevine Mountains in two. It's called Titus Canyon, and it is spectacular. It certainly is not a secret, and one of the great adventures of visiting Death Valley is to drive the 26 mile long gravel road through the Grapevine Mountains. Literally through the mountain, not over it. The pass at the upper end is on the east side of the mountains, not at the crest.

In places, the canyon reaches depths of 3,000 feet or more, and the steep canyon walls offer unparalleled exposures of the faults and folds that from the structure of the mountain range. As can be seen in the diagrams below, the structure is complex.

The "upside-down mountain"? The rocks of the Bonanza King Formation that are exposed in the lower canyon have been so completely folded that they are inverted. Even though the layers look only gently tilted, they are in fact upside down.

Source: California Geological Survey and National Park Service

The road through Titus Canyon is sometimes okay for normal sedans, but conditions can change, and there are rough spots. We didn't have the time to do the entire one-way journey (from east to west), but it is permissible to drive from Death Valley to the entrance of the canyon and walk into the narrows where the canyon is deepest and darkest.

We did just that on our February visit to the Valley of Death and started hiking up canyon. In places the canyon is only 20 feet wide with vertical walls. Evidence of severe floods was evident everywhere in the form of smooth polished surfaces and pockets of debris tens of feet up on the canyon walls.

The Bonanza King Formation is mostly composed of limestone or dolomite, a carbonate rock that was deposited in warm shallow water in Cambrian time just over 500 million years ago. This was not long after complex life forms first appeared on the planet, and the fossils found within the formation reflect the strangeness of the time. Most of the hard-shelled creatures were a type of arthropod called a trilobite. They resembled a cross between the Horseshoe Crabs found in today's seas, and the roly-polies that can be found in your backyard.

There are few fossils found in the Bonanza King exposures at Titus Canyon. This is a trilobite carapace from the Carrara formation at Emigrant Pass, east of Death Valley National Park.

The trilobites were extremely diverse, filling many environmental niches in the early Paleozoic seas, and they lasted for several hundred million years as a group, but by the end of the Paleozoic era they were extinct, losing out in competition with other arthropods like crabs or lobsters. Some good samples can be found in mountain ranges east of Death Valley National Park.

A mile or so up the canyon one encounters a creepy old guy standing next to the rock a fascinating exposure of broken up limestone called a megabreccia. It looks like evidence of severe geological mayhem, but was probably the result of slowly evolving deformation and cracking of the rock over millions of years of incremental folding. As cracks in the rock slowly widened, they were filled in with calcium carbonate carried in the groundwater.

In the photo above one can see the efficient manner in which flash flooding has kept the outcrop clean and visible. There is a tight turn in the canyon just downstream along with an alcove produced by mudflows impacting the canyon wall and making a sharp right turn.

We started back down the canyon taking in the incredible sight of the Cottonwood Mountains through the narrow slot canyon. It's a fascinating place to explore. As we emerged from the canyon onto the top of the alluvial fan for Titus Canyon, we had a wide-ranging view of northern Death Valley, with the Panamint and Cottonwood Mountains in the distance with the Death Valley dunes on the valley floor.

We got back in the vans and headed towards the Black Mountains. We were about to encounter Dante's View...

The Answer to Sunday's Mystery Quiz...And Where I'm Headed Tomorrow

The answer is: Death Valley National Park!

I admit that I was trying to be a bit deceptive with my pictures. Many people have a stereotypical image of Death Valley that includes salt flats, sand dunes, and miners with their burros tramping over barren desert mountains. Those things are part of what Death Valley is, but there is so much more.

I mentioned in Sunday's post that Death Valley is possibly the most geological park in the entire National Park System. The reasons for saying this include what I pointed out before: "the park contains rocks from every major era, ranging in age from as much as 2.3 billion years ago, including perhaps the most complete Paleozoic sequence of rocks found anywhere (something like 20,000 feet of Paleozoic rocks, including formations from each period), rocks from the Mesozoic (including plutonic granitic rocks), and a sequence of early Cenozoic sediments known for their mammalian fossils. The youngest rocks in the park may be only a few hundred years old."

There are other superlatives that can be added: the lowest point in the western hemisphere, the hottest temperature ever recorded on planet Earth, the driest place in North America, and features like the mysterious sliding stones of Racetrack Playa, the strange "turtleback" faults and metamorphic core complexes, Lake Manly (the freshwater lake that filled Death Valley 600 feet deep during the ice ages), and four species of fish (!!) including possibly the most endangered vertebrate species on Earth, the Devils Hole Pupfish.

There's more: the Ubehebe Craters, classic maar volcanoes that may have exploded only a few centuries ago, the badlands topography of Zabriskie Point, the Badwater salt pan, evidence of previous Death Valley type grabens that formed 15-20 million years ago, Neogene tuff deposits recording a wave of rhyolite eruptions across the American West, and the iconic sand dune fields.

As I said before, the park is so extensive and intricate, one could explore it for years and always find new treasures. If you are curious, the top picture is a view towards northern Death Valley from the lower end of Titus Canyon. The road through Titus is an epic adventure where one drives not over, but through a mountain range. The second picture is from the deepest part of the canyon, where the walls rise 3,000 feet, providing a Grand Canyon kind of feeling.

The third picture is one of the unexpected pleasures of exploring Death Valley. In the newer part of the park on the western side of Panamint Valley there is a permanent spring system and a 20 foot high waterfall. Darwin Falls is only a mile of hiking, and is a pleasant contrast to the barren desert.

The last picture is Mosaic Canyon, a better known part of the park, but a place with strange secrets. The mosaics are breccias and conglomerates that have been plastered to the sides of the canyon, but structural geologists seek out the exquisite structures revealed in the yellowish Noonday Dolomite of latest Proterozoic age. Callan Bentley of Mountain Beltway recently posted some neat shots of the folds in the lower canyon.

So that's where I'm taking 25 or so students tomorrow. It's hard for me to think of another single park or region that offers so much geologic diversity in one place.

Of course, you may have a different opinion...is there a place in the world that has more geologic diversity than Death Valley? I would love to know what you think!