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...

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.

Where are the Ten Most Incredible Places You've Ever Stood? My Number 3: Standing over Dante's Inferno in the Broken Lands

The Panamint Mountains and Telescope Peak, the highest part of Death Valley National Park, as seen from Dante's View..

Death Valley is the hottest place on planet Earth.  Furnace Creek 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. Badwater, a dozen miles south of Furnace Creek at the deepest point in the valley, is often a few degrees hotter. The hottest overnight temperature ever recorded, 107 °F (42 °C), was measured here on July 12, 2012. That day, the average temperature was 117.5 °F (47.5 °C), the world's hottest 24-hours on record.

Hot temperatures are an interesting feature of Death Valley National Park, but the park is much more significant for other reasons. It contains a wider range and variety of rocks than any other park that I know of. I have been chronicling our February journey to Death Valley over the last few months in a series called "Out of the Valley of Death", and today's post is a confluence of the two series that I've been working on. Dante's View was our next stop after exploring the interior of an upside-down mountain at Titus Canyon, and it makes number three on my list of the Ten Most Incredible Places I've Ever Stood.

The Black Mountains of Death Valley are one of the most rugged mountain ranges in existence. They rise 6,000 feet almost straight up from the lowest part of the Death Valley graben and are practically devoid of trails or roads. The thought of climbing the mountain front near Badwater is as daunting a challenge as I can imagine. The Proterozoic metamorphic rocks are highly deformed and internally sheared by intense faulting, making for a highly unstable climbing surface. But there is a way to the top of the range. A paved highway winds up the other more gentle eastern side of the mountain range, reaching Dante's View at an elevation of 5,476 ft (1,669 m). The overlook is directly above Badwater, more than a mile below at -282 feet ( -86 m). It has one of the most incredible views to be found in any national park.

Frank DeCourten called the Basin and Range province where Death Valley is located the "Broken Land", and the description is apt. From Dante's View, thousands of square miles of land are visible as range after range marches off into the distance. In the last few million years crust in this region was stretched beyond the breaking point, and it broke into countless grabens (fault valleys) and horsts (fault-block mountain ranges).  River drainages that once reached the sea do so no longer, and water leaves the region only by evaporation. The region is sometimes called the "Great Basin" despite the multitude of mountain ranges. Death Valley is the lowest of the low, the ending point of numerous desert washes and the Amargosa "River" that sometimes in wet years has water.

At Dante's View, one's attention is most often drawn towards the salt pan of Death Valley, the lowest land in North America (in the picture above). It is quite a sight, and so alien-looking that it stood in as the location of Mos Eisely in the original Star Wars. Obi-Wan Kenobi and Luke Skywalker stood here, looking at the spaceport and mentioning that "You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy". The salt that covers the valley floor to a depth of hundreds of feet was washed out of the marine sediments that make up many of the mountains in the region, and from the rain itself. Water flows into the salt pan and evaporates, leaving behind the salt and other minerals, including gypsum and calcite.

The view from Dante's encompasses, well, the entire compass. To the south (above) the Black Mountains continue for several miles, including two of the gigantic "turtleback faults". The rocks are some of the oldest in the western United States at 1.7 billion years. The dark metamorphic rocks gave the mountains their name. Although the slopes are not as hot and dry as the valley floor, it is still a tough environment for most plants. The mountains are as barren as any I've ever seen.

To the north (above), the Black Mountains include younger volcanic rocks dating from the middle and late Cenozoic era. They include the Artist Drive Formation, and the ancient lake and valley sediments of the Furnace Creek and Funeral formations. The Grapevine Mountains rise in the far distance. They are composed of thick sequences of marine sediments dating from the Paleozoic era. The farthest ranges are more than 60 miles away.

To the east (above), range after range culminates in the snow-covered Spring Mountains above Las Vegas (did you know you can ski near Las Vegas?). The highest peaks exceed 12,000 feet. Some of the water that accumulates on the slopes of the Spring Mountains travels underground through the intervening mountains to emerge as springs in Death Valley.

One of the most amazing things about the view from Dante's is how different it would have appeared 20,000 years ago during the last of the ice ages. Meltwater from the glaciers of the Sierra Nevada drained into the Great Basin, filling one valley after another until it spilled over into the Death Valley graben, forming a 600 foot deep lake more than 100 miles long.The lake left behind shorelines and terraces in what is currently the driest place in North America, and at least four species of native fish which still live in isolated springs around the park.

Water still accumulates in the Death Valley graben on occasion. Lakes were there in 2005 and 2010, but the same wet weather that filled the salt pan with water also wreaked havoc with the road to Dante's View and it was closed, so I have no pictures of the lake from above. This one from the valley floor will have to do.

Some of my choices for the "ten most incredible places" involved lava, or fossils, or significant historical and geological events. I chose Dante's View for sheer grandeur. From the high vantage point of Dante's, one gets a sense of being on top of the world, a world that is sometimes an inferno, and certainly broken up. There are few places on Earth like it.

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.

Strangers in a Strange Land: Salt and the end of all things

In February and March I made a series of trips to the Mojave Desert and Death Valley, and since then I have been conducting a blog journey through the basic principles of geology as exposed in this extraordinary desert environment (Strangers in a Strange Land). In the last post we were looking up at the Black Mountains and the strange Turtleback faults, but today we are looking down, down as far as we can look on the North American continent. We have reached Badwater and the salt pan of Death Valley.

The end of all things? Strange topic I suppose, but I have been watching Frozen Planet on the Discovery Channel over the last few weeks, and it has had an emotional impact. Not so much the cute animals and the little dramas of survival against their predators and so on. That gets to be manipulative after a while and loses impact with me. It was more watching the Emperor Penguins, and their struggle to survive as the last year-round non-flying vertebrate life form on the continent of Antarctica (Oh, except for this...).

Antarctica was once a lush forested continent. It once teemed with life, with dinosaurs that wandered through the trees and swamps, along with birds, amphibians, and later on, marsupial mammals. Antarctica was in fact the bridge by which ancient marsupials reached Australia for the first time, where they thrived.

But life in Antarctica was doomed. As long as the continent was still connected to the other southern continents, warm ocean currents kept the landmass temperate enough to hold back the formation of glaciers. But sometime in the early Cenozoic era, around 50 million years or so, the last connections to the other continents were severed. Antarctica was isolated, not just by water, but by cold ocean currents that surrounded the continent. The glaciers grew larger and larger, turning into ice sheets thousands of feet thick. As more and more land disappeared, animal and plant species disappeared, unable to adapt to the new frigid conditions.The thread of life frayed to the point of snapping.


Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Kaiserpinguine_mit_Jungen.jpg

Except for those penguins. Somehow, they have continued to survive, adapting their reproductive habits to the seasonal patterns, standing their ground through the harsh winters, standing for months on end with an egg, and later a chick between their legs. The parents don't eat for months at a time, trading parental duties while their mates chase fish many miles away. They stand, literally, at the edge of survival in the harshest land imaginable on this planet.

What do these musings have to do with Death Valley? The "end of all things" can be interpreted any number of ways, and here, the extremes run the opposite direction. Death Valley is the product of the disruption of the Earth's crust, a disruption so complete that no river drainages in the province will ever reach the sea. Death Valley is the sump, the low place to which all waters flow, on the surface and underground. It is the end of rivers. And Death Valley is, like Antarctica, a place where animal and plant life face insurmountable challenges. Out on the salt flats life ends.

Death Valley was a pleasant environment once upon a time. During the Ice Ages, which dominated much of the last two million years (equaling about half the time that the Death Valley graben has existed), the valley collected glacial meltwater, and thus was a freshwater lake. The surrounding mountains were still semi-arid, but forests of juniper and other trees extended to the shores of the lakes, along with extensive grasslands. A diverse ecosystem thrived; mammoths, mastodons, horses, camels, antelope grazed here, and were hunted by carnivores like sabertooth cats, American lions, and wolves. At some point in time, a connection was made with the Colorado River drainage or some other river system now lost to us. So there were fish in the lakes.

No one could mistake Mono Lake for a verdant paradise, but forests come almost to the shoreline.

But things changed. Around 11,000 or 12,000 years ago the latest stage of the ice ages, the Tioga, ended. The rivers shrank to a trickle and gave out. The vast lake in Death Valley, over 100 miles long, and 600 feet deep, evaporated bit by bit, and with each dry season the salt content climbed. Finally, the last of the water left, and a vast salt flat was created. The desert baked in the summer sun.

Some animals migrated elsewhere, and but most went extinct. Bighorn sheep and coyotes are the largest animals still found anywhere in the region, but you won't find them here on the salt pan. It is one of the most sterile environments on the planet (the biologists will have to let me know if bacteria can thrive in a pure salt environment like this). And what of the fish?

Nope, no fish here anymore...

As pointed out before, Death Valley was the sump where all the regional water collected. It still is. The surface water is wildly inconsistent, but springs tap into underground reservoirs, and they flow on a year-round basis, and have been doing so since the last of the freshwater lakes dried up. A precious few species of fish took refuge in these springs and survive to the present day. In Death Valley the survivors are the pupfish (Cyprinodon). Like their penguin counterparts in the southern hemisphere, they survive in some of the harshest climates in the world. Some of the Death Valley species persist in water that reaches 100 degrees, and salinity that is three times that of seawater.

They're also hard to photograph...

The most endangered species is the Devils Hole Pupfish. The entire population occupies a single cavern opening in Ash Meadows just east of Death Valley. The population has hardly ever exceeded 300 individuals, but it sometimes dips to only two or three dozen. As if the 92 degree water and the precarious food supply (a ledge of algae covered rock) isn't enough, they sometimes have to put up with the bizarre effects of distant earthquakes (check out this video). But through it all the pupfish have found a way to adapt survive.

That's the entire population of Devils Hole Pupfish down there....

Death Valley is the hottest and one of the driest places on the planet. And the climate is warming. What changes are in store? It is hard to know. But I have a feeling that the rare years when the Amargosa River flows all the way to the valley floor will become all the rarer.

It will not be so often that we can see a six-inch deep lake on the floor of Death Valley, and imagine how it once was...