Death Valley

12/7/08
When I drove southeast out of Lone Pine on State Route 138, I was entering new territory for me. The highway skirts Owens Lake, getting some water now for the first time in a while, though not so much a casual observer would notice. The highway cuts south of the Inyo Range and north of the Coso Range and Argus Ranges, south of the Nelson Range - this is Basin and Range for real. The Panamint Range loomed ahead and I didn’t want to take that on with dark approaching, so I settled for a tent site in a little private concession RV park at Panamint Springs. It had maybe a bit more of the intimacies and aesthetics than you’d expect for a tent site in an RV park, but as an oasis it had real value - there’s not much out there. The forecast mentioned rain. That’s right - rain. I had arrived at the driest of deserts and the week’s forecast called for rain.

Still, I was reading outside by lamplight for the first time in memory. It was 8:30PM and quite pleasant. The LA Times proved rough going as the economy was spiraling downward, so I settled in with the Death Valley National Park newsletter instead. Herbert Hoover made Death Valley a National Monument in February 1933 (inauguration day came later then). The Pacific Coast Borax Company was a prime mover in protecting the area for tourism. The newsletter didn't mention that the National Park's first director, Stephen Mather, launched the wildly successful Twenty Mule Team Borax advertising campaign and subsequently made his fortune in borax, though not from Death Valley. In 1994 Congress expanded the 1.6 million acre National Monument to a 3.4 million acre National Park, the largest in the lower-48 states. 770,000 people visit annually. Spring is the busiest season: warm and sunny, with a chance of wildflowers.


On September 29, 2007, the National Park Service sponsored an All Taxa Biological Inventory at Death Valley. Better known as a bio-blitz, this is a complete inventory of all life forms in a small, precisely drawn area. The participants found 439 individual organisms, the majority of which - 322 - were ants, representing 11 species. One species was found for the first time in California. Another had just recently been discovered. They also found 14 species of spiders, including one previously unknown species, this out of only 21 individual spiders!

I read about the Kangaroo Rat, a small rodent that gets all the water it needs by eating seeds. I thought that was pretty impressive, but then I read about the desert pupfish. This tiny fish is a relict from the Ice Age, migrating to Death Valley tens of thousands of years ago when glacier meltwater filled the desert basins with rivers and lakes. As weather warmed, the water dried up, and few other species survived, the pupfish retreated to smaller and smaller ponds and adapted to warmer and saltier water. They survive now - “land-locked in one of the most bizarre and challenging fish habitats imaginable” - tiny pools that can exceed 100 degrees in summer and contain three times the salt content as the ocean.


One pupfish species, the Devil’s Hole pupfish, lives in the smallest habitat for a vertebrate animal known in the world (given the results of the bio-blitz, I’d add ‘so far’), a 500-foot-deep natural well. This small (an inch or less long) but very distinct species is entirely dependent for survival upon a shelf of rock near the top of the well, roughly 10 square feet in size, covered by about a foot of water, where enough sunlight penetrates to generate the algae on which the pupfish survive. The shelf is susceptible to water table fluctuations. Flash floods dump rocks and gravel on the shelf, but then earthquakes near and far periodically flush the debris off the shelf down into the well. A 7.9 Alaska earthquake caused the water in the Hole to bob up and down 6 feet.

The pupfish was one of the first species to be listed under the Endangered Species Act. In 1976 the US Supreme Court ruled in favor of the water rights of Devil’s Hole and its pupfish against groundwater pumping. Nevertheless the Devil’s Hole pupfish population began to drop about ten years ago and biologists can’t figure out why. Water levels aren’t dropping sharply, but they’re heading down. Global warming is a reasonable suspect, as these pupfish are already living close to the margin of extinction.
 
Thus informed, I drove the next morning from Panamint Springs at 1940 feet elevation up to Townie Pass at 4963 feet and then - whoosh - 17 miles to Stove Pipe Wells, elevation 5 feet. Five. This was Death Valley, the lowest basin in the Basin and Range. It bottoms out at 282 feet below sea level, the lowest spot in North America, the second lowest in the Western Hemisphere, the eighth lowest on the planet. It is surrounded almost completely by mountains. Telescope Peak, the highest, is 11,049 feet. This is a very deep hole.

Death Valley is not actually a valley - it was not cut by running water - but a graben, which is a block of earth falling deeper into the earth as a result of earthquake fault action. The bedrock of Death Valley is actually some eight thousand feet lower than the ground on which I stood, ground built up with thousands of feet of mud and rock eroding from the mountains as they were thrust skyward with the same fault action that is hurling the bottom down. The Basin and Range continues to pull apart., and Death Valley continues to get lower.

I proceeded to the heart of the park around Furnace Creek, 190 feet below sea level, and took a spot at the Texas Spring Campground for $14. Darkish clouds were building from the west and the ranger said Death Valley could be seeing some rain. And sure enough, .44" of rain fell that night. Considering that from January 1, 2008 until my arrival on November 25th, Death Valley had received .74" of rain, this was a downpour. Death Valley handles rain like Seattle handles snow. Roads close, roofs leak, campsites flood (though mine, thankfully, did not). Apparently it could have been a lot worse. A park employee out to check the roads the next morning told me he was surprised by how little damage the storm had done. The ground had been dry and the rain came just slowly enough to be absorbed. If the rain had been a bit harder or lasted much longer, sediment washing down the canyons would have buried key roads, closing them for weeks.

As it was, activity was curtailed for a couple of days so I spent time attending ranger walks and evening programs. It was Thanksgiving weekend and comparatively crowded, sort of 4th of July in the desert, the park was in full gear, a relief after having Yosemite close down around me in October. I went to an evening ranger program on the Desert Pupfish. The ranger was Jay Snow, a charismatic guy who has walked across the country, met the Pope, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and Billy Graham. He aimed his program for the 7-11 year-olds and they loved him, making the primary attraction watching him and the kids interact. Unfortunately adults that night outnumbered kids 20-1.

One evening program was entitled "100 Ways to Die in Death Valley". I missed that one. Actually the most common cause of death in DVNP is a single car accident. This isn't hard to imagine. The roads are very straight and totally empty, the immediate surroundings flat and very sparse, while the overall landscape is stunning and enormous. It is easy to become lulled by the road and transfixed by middle distance views and - uh oh - a curve. I couldn't see what you'd actually hit that could kill you though; creosote bushes seem pretty forgiving.

On Thanksgiving morning I drove down to Badwater for a ranger walk. Badwater Road is a fine two-lane paved road that just barely squeezes between the saltpan and the alluvial fans reaching down from the Black Mountains. Harder rain would have closed this road for sure, and in fact the road is doomed to be buried - I don’t know how soon or what the park service might do about it.

Death Valley is maybe the penultimate endorheic basin, and Badwater is the bottom of the bottom, 280 feet below sea level at the parking lot, 282 feet below somewhere out there in the salt plain. A watershed the size of New Hampshire eventually drains to here, at least the water that doesn't evaporate along the way, and evaporation at Badwater has left almost 200 square miles. of salt plain.

Thick clouds hung very low over the basin, obscuring the Panamints across the valley and weaving mysteriously in and out of the Black Mountains rising precipitously above the road. A viewing platform descends from the parking area to a boardwalk that goes out over the salt pan before giving way to a foot-beaten path on the saltpan itself. This flattened “trail” looked looked like an ice rink, though the ground wasn’t slippery. It disappeared into cloudy horizon, and I wondered if it continued all the wayt across the five mile valley to the Panamints.

Black Mountains Rising Abruptly Above Badwater and Outhouse

Badwater

Jay Snow was again the ranger and he led a crowd of some 75 of us, itself rather amusing-looking in this environment, onto the salt flat. I couldn't always hear him and I was more interested in the visuals anyway. The recent rains had left pools of standing water. Badwater is actually well-watered. It's just, well, bad water. Dig down a little bit and you come to a very high water table, and a couple of holes show just that. Jay asked that we never do that. You couldn’t drink it even in an emergency - the water is foul to the point of toxicity - so the holes are little better than vandalism.

Beyond where feet have worn down a path, the salt pack is sharp and pinnacled. This is most pronounced at Devil’s Golf Course where I stopped on my way back from Badwater. Here the pinnacles grow to several feet and look like ocean waves coming in, only hard waves and sharp as knives. Slip on this and you’ll get cut. Somewhat out of character, I managed to avoid doing that.

Badwater salt pan

II

Though it had stopped raining, thick clouds still hung low over the mountains, and I faced a quandary over the safety of hiking. Nearly all of the hikes are in canyons and washes. With nearly no vegetation on the slopes, any rain that falls in the mountains quickly races downslope, bringing mud and rock along with it, posing a formidable hazard to anyone walking in its path. I’ve read of flash floods caused by single cloudbursts so quick the cloud wasn’t even visible from the trail below. Hikers have to know the characteristics of the drainages and surrounding watersheds, and thus far I did not. So in the beginning I stuck to the nearby popular trails.

Which wasn’t really a hardship, as the nearby popular trails were pretty great. I started with a two mile round trip hike into Golden Canyon, through the Furnace Creek Formation, one of some 60 rock formations geologists have identified in Death Valley National Park. While I don‘t usually think of rock formations as delightful, the Furnace Creek Formation is nothing less. Soft mudstone in yellows, creams, and oranges, glowing golden in the late afternoon sun, carved into beautiful curves and swirls and angles and pinnacles. Endlessly pictorial.

The Furnace Creek Formation began as mud from from lake and playa bottoms 4 to 6 million years ago, which is quite recent as these things go. It contains some tracks of camels and mastodons, but I didn’t see any of that. It also contains borax, the all-purpose mineral that helped make Death Valley famous and vice-versa. If I saw any of that, I didn‘t know it.

Two significant monuments rise above the canyon. Manly Beacon is golden and has a classic mountain look, though it rises only to 750’. Red Cathedral soars to 943’ and looks almost garish behind the golden foreground. It is a tougher conglomerate that erodes into fluted cliffs. Both lend an aura of mountainous terrain, but still looked like a Candyland landscape to me.

Manly Beacon

Red Cathedral

The next day I headed back into Golden Canyon and then veered off onto the mildly more adventurous trail over the top of the badlands toward Gower Gulch. I have to tell you, it was pretty magical. Lovely temperature, blue skies, light clouds, light breeze. In this light and color the badlands looked like modernist landscape art - Cezanne to Cubism - come to life. They seem like art, but they're only DIRT, dirt softened from the rain. You can hike on them, jump around all over them. The only real restriction other than safety is aesthetic; you want to stick to existing foot paths to avoid marring the beauty for everyone else.

Manly Beacon over Badlands

Furnace Creek Formation

What I didn't understand, though, was why such a beautiful scene would be called badlands, which I had always assumed was a generic putdown of parched mountainous land. Eventually, though, I learned that badlands is not a generic descriptive of miserable-ness but a term for a specific type of rock formation: clay-ey mudstone, too sterile for plant growth and nearly impermeable, so that rain carves runnels that form mounds of almost classical shape.

A side trip to Zabriskie Point added another couple of terrific miles to the 4-plus mile loop, plus a humorous scene. Zabriskie Point is a short walk from a major roadside stop along a different highway than I came in from, and I emerged sweating and unkempt from the very landscape that busloads of tourists were photographing from the viewpoint.

Complete the loop out through Gower Gulch, where I found some incredibly sensual mud.

III

With the sun back out, daytime temperatures were reaching into the 70s, small beer for Death Valley but too hot and bright for me between noon and two. This was in early December mind you. I can’t even conceive of people coming here in the summer, but they do. I reverted to my desert-style schedule by hiking in the morning, laying low at midday for lunch/nap/coffee/read in the shade of my Flying-Nun rain fly, and then heading back out in mid-afternoon.


Then in mid-afternoon I headed off to Artist’s Drive - a 9-mile paved loop road through a multi-colored volcanic landscape. Nearly everyone on this drive goes to the same couple of spots, the main attraction being an exposure called Artist’s Palette, but I came to use it as a jeep road for low-slung sedans like mine. Park just about anywhere on the side of the road and hike to wherever looks interesting out in a very fascinating landscape. The park has nearly no trails or hiking restrictions. You have to be careful with where you put your car - you can't drive off-road or park on pavement - but where you put your feet is basically irrelevant. The canyons obviously provide some structure, but even there the potential for improvisation is limitless.

Few others seemed to think that way. Nearly every time I parked my car two or three others would soon pull up behind me because they thought it must be an OFFICIAL PLACE TO STOP. They would peer around to see what was the attraction and at some point I presume they realized it was just some oddball wandering off into the desert. I could go out and take a leak in the creosote and come back to find three cars parked behind me. It was bizarre. In any case, Artists Palette itself struck me as comparatively ugly. Who looks at an Artist’s palette, anyway? It’s the painting that matters, and Death Valley uses its palette to far greater artistic effect elsewhere, including elsewhere along Artist’s Drive.

Artists Drive

“Drive on established roads only. Park off pavement.”

 

Back at the fort my otherwise quiet guy who snored quite loudly was gone, replaced by a family of six, suburban types who beeped their car horn every time they opened or closed the van door, which was pretty much constantly. It was a big windy night and they all ended up sleeping in their van. I talked to the father briefly the next morning. This was their first camping trip, and the look on his face suggested it might have been their last camping trip as well.


Larry from the site next door came over and sat at my picnic table, talking as I ate. He was writing two books, a self-help book and a childrens book, even though he had never written a book before. He was excited to believe he had made a connection (me) to the book industry. It was hard to convey the fact that I really wouldn't be able to do anything without sounding, well, unhelpful. His retirement money was tied up in real estate that has lost its value, at least for the time being. He was spending 40 days in the desert. He was picking up trash for his daily meditation. After he left I sat out blissfully reading without even changing out of my hiking shirt, it was that warm out. I had a beer. I looked at the stars.



Another camper set up an enormous telescope and invited one and all to come take a look. He was an astronomy professor yearning for a hungry audience. I saw Jupiter and its four moons. I saw what he said were an open-cluster and an exploding supernova. Jupiter and Venus were closely aligned and would remain so for weeks. He said Saturn would show up along the same line ‘later’. He would have shown me everything in the sky and I might have been interested, but he was single-minded and said what he had to say regardless of my undeniably remedial questions. This wasn’t so rewarding so I retreated to my site and a bit later he came over to give me an update.

I was up early Sunday morning and had eaten breakfast and read 50 pages and it was barely 8:00 AM. I spent the morning wandering the 20-Mule Team Road, closed to vehicles due to mud. Wonderful sunshine, wonderful colors, all Georgia O’Keefe most obviously, and Arthur Dove, plus Rockwell Kent, even though he worked mostly in the Arctic - similarities between the desert and the arctic have been noted often.



Rockwell Kent does 20 Mule Team Road



By Sunday afternoon the campground had pretty-much emptied out and had become very quiet in the early dark. I had stayed at this campground for six nights, the longest I would stay in one campsite my entire trip. The next day I drove out to Pahrump for supplies, a nice enough hour and a half drive, totally straight and no traffic. On the way back I rocked out to The Wild the Innocent and the  E Street Shuffle and Never a Dull Moment, two great records still sounding good to me.

Back at Death Valley I enjoyed a sweet evening stroll out in the Mesquite sand dunes. Lots of angles and shadows and curves. They only rise to 100 feet or so, and right off road so there were few spots without footprints. I would have more profound sand dune experiences on my trip, but this was a fine start. Nice breeze. Damn nice breeze. Walking back after sunset, in the moist sand, with cool salty breeze and warm air, brought back vividly physical memories of evenings at the Jersey shore. I was looking for the ferris wheel out on the Seaside pier. Ah, poignant moments.

I camped that night at Emigrant Campground, 2000’ higher elevation than Texas Spring and markedly colder, both from elevation and from winds howling over the mountain pass. But it was free, way quieter: no water, no fires allowed, so only people who really wanted quiet seemed to be there. Evening was just sittable, in sweatshirts and hat, not hiking clothes. Quarter moon, Jupiter, Venus.

Sitting at the campground Tuesday morning I saw something there I'd never seen before. I woke up to beautiful clouds pouring over the range south of me, huge dark thunderstorm-looking clouds glowing pink with dawn. Then the sun rose and within a half hour had completely evaporated the entire cloud formation; they collapsed as if the sun was sucking them up with a vacuum, until poof, blue skies. It was amazing.


 I badly needed a real hike, and would have loved to make the ambitious trek to the top of Death Valley on Telescope Peak, but the road sounded too rough for my Yaris so I settled for Wildrose Peak. Lovely day, trail mostly western juniper, views eventually reaching more or less 360 degrees, but the distance to Death Valley reduced the impact. Looking down on some very old rocks. 8RT/2200’ makes it more a workout than I’ve been getting lately, and worth it for that alone.

Death Valley from Wildrose Peak

IV

Thursday morning was overcast, and this time the sun did not burn the clouds off. I arrived at the trailhead for Mosaic Canyon at 9:00 AM sharp for a ranger-led hike but no one else was there, not even a ranger. I checked my schedule and saw that while I was right on time, I was also a day late. I had to go by myself. Few other hikers were out that morning on one of the park's more popular hikes. The canyon cuts through marble walls - not that I would have recognized it but that is what I‘d read - metamorphosed from limestone laid down some 800 million years ago (compared to the Furnace Creek Formation's 5 million years), and polished smooth by running water. Mosaic Canyon begins some 1000 feet above the valley floor and drains 6732’ Tucki Mountain, so it gets a lot of flash floods.

Mosaic Canyon

Mosaic Canyon

The canyon was nice but the light was awful, and I was unable to raise my mood above the gray of the day. I worried some whether I was capable of enjoying a hike if I couldn't take some good pictures. The visuals of hiking are important to me, and I do become more sharply attuned to these visuals by taking pictures. On those rare occasions when I hike with someone else I take far fewer pictures, so I have to conclude that picture-taking is my dialogue with a place. Not to mention that I can then spend the rest of my life looking at the good ones. Still, it remains a concern, though not one I intend on tackling head-on.

But I figured this cloud cover would make for a grand afternoon on the salt plain, which would be way too hot in the midday sun, and I was right. I headed to Salt Creek is a small spring-fed creek that happens to be the largest single surface inflow to Death Valley. It is also home to a species of pupfish, Cyprinodon salinus. Pupfish don't come out during winter so I did not get to see one.  No people were out either, so I had the place almost entirely to myself. The sky remained gray for a while and I spent the time dinking around the salt flats, waiting for the late afternoon sun. It finally cleared up around 2:00 PM and was worth the wait.

Being at a higher elevation, less water accumulates at Salt Creek than at Badwater, so less salt is left behind as a ratio to dirt. Rather than hard and sharp, it has a softer texture, softened further from the previous week's half inch of rain - "all that rain we had around Thanksgiving" is how one ranger put it. So it wasn’t hard like dirt and rock but not all muddy either. It was like paper mache, I thought, but then realized I wasn’t really sure what paper mache is. Eventually I came up with a better simile. It's like cookie dough, or maybe a crust of bread. It gives just a little. And with the lowering sun, the browns and whites merging look more and more like wonderful pastries. Erotic mud? Yummy salt flats? Oh dear. I was sufficiently hydrated, I knew. It's just a strange place.

Funeral Mountains from Salt Creek

The scene became increasingly gorgeous the lower the sun dropped, until it was as beautiful as any I had yet seen. Over the glowing salt flat, up the alluvial fans to the Funeral Mountains and finally the blue sky. I squeezed every last drop of light out of it. To the south I could see the basin opening somewhat between two mountain ranges; and this is where every now and then the Amargosa River in high flood will bring in water as far as Badwater Basin before giving out in the saltpan.

People often ask me what was my favorite place. I don’t have an actual answer to that, as too many places compete, but I usually say Death Valley. It’s greatness was something both entirely new to me and entirely unexpected.

Night was coming very quickly now. December 4^th. I faced two and a half more weeks of shortening days. Five weeks of days this short or shorter.

V

Thus far Death Valley had been quite benign, and mine was mainly a story of absences. In addition to the pupfish, I’d yet to see a scorpion, a black widow, a sidewinder, or a tarantula. Actually I was OK with most of that. But I had also not yet seen a roadrunner, and I was crazy to see a roadrunner! The frustrating thing was roadrunners aren’t that rare; people told me they saw them all the time. I just couldn’t manage it. Another one of those inexplicable shortcomings, I suppose.

On Friday morning I moved my camp down to Stovepipe Wells, elevation 5', paying $14 for that 2000’ elevation loss. On one side of my tent was an enormous parking lot, sparsely occupied by RVS. On the other side was seemingly endless desert. I got a fleeting glimpse of my first kangaroo rat. I walked across the parking lot to use the restroom and came back to find a raven had poked a gaping hole into my water bottle.

On Saturday morning I drove out to Ubehebe Craters, a cluster of craters created when rising magma hit ground water, turning it to steam which exploded from the pressure. Some of them may have exploded as recently as 300 years ago. This wasn’t all that high on my priorities, or else I’d have been there sooner. I’d seen craters and there was so much else around that I hadn‘t seen before. Plus I had been slowly developing a bias that craters are more interesting in theory than actual presence, which tends towards piles of cinder chips.

My spirits didn’t pick up when I arrived. I did like the long low light on the salt bush against the - yes - cinder chips, but the rest of the landscape was looking flat, except for a few holes in the ground (which is what craters are.) I actually got back into the car and started driving away before having a change of heart, realizing I didn’t want to drive over to Titus Canyon in the middle of the day. So I walked up and around Little Hebe crater, around Ubehebe Crater, about 1½ mile in all, taking the best pictures I could find, knowing they weren’t that good, and fighting hard against my despondency. (Things aren’t good when I’m singing Don Henley’s “Heart of the Matter”).

But things slowly picked up, and once more the main reason was light. Early morning light at Death Valley is not really better than mid-morning light, at least in December. The more direct sun brings out the colors more, not less. The exercise helped, as did sticking to my commitment. So I went down into the big crater, 750’ deep - and what do you know - it was pretty terrific. Great playa, huge vertical walls deeply eroded into small colorful canyons. I spent over an hour exploring and was the only one down there the entire time, even as dozens of visitors appeared along the top, most of them just peering down, not even walking around the top. Sunny, coolish breeze.

Ubehebe Crater

After lunch I drove down to Titus Canyon. The road in was the worst I’d ever attempted. It took me 45 minutes to drive the three miles. I had to get out of the car a couple of times to gauge a passable route through the boulders. When I got to the trailhead I chose the Fall Canyon rather than Titus Canyon hike, and it was pretty terrific. I started too late to complete the hike, raising the question of whether I “did” the hike. I thought I might go back the next day to settle the matter.  Late afternoon light made for nice colors but also told me I needed to get out before dark. I wasn’t all that concerned in the canyon, but I still had that road ahead of me. Had to do the road again at dusk, though it was less tortuous because I wasn’t anxious to get to a hike.

Fall Canyon

Sunday morning had a northwest-like overcast. It looked like rain to me. I didn’t feel like going back to Titus Canyon anyway (surprise surprise), so I decided to call it quits at Death Valley and head down to the next stop, Mojave National Preserve.