Geology lessons in Death Valley

Sunset, Feb, 1995 by Matthew Jaffe

It's one of our two newest national parks, as well as a great place to appreciate geological forces at work

It's like sitting on A ledge - in space. From the top of 11,049-foot Telescope Peak in the Panamint Range, the floor of Death Valley spreads out almost 2 miles below. Practically straight down. Salt pans feather and streak the valley north of Badwater - at 282 feet below sea level, the lowest point in North America - looking like clouds, not minerals.

A sense of relief at the completion of a 7-mile, 3,000-foot climb is to be expected. But this sense of geological relief is almost beyond imagining. Across the valley, a mere 20 miles away; the 6,000-foot-plus Black Mountains barely stop the eye as the view extends east into Nevada. To the northwest rises the jagged ridge of 14,495-foot Mount Whitney, the highest point in the continental United States.

You don't have to be a rock hound to wonder what created a land of such dramatic opposites. For that matter, you don't have to climb a mountain to appreciate it. As you walk through this valley of death, look up at the snow-capped Panamints and consider that their rise is one of the steepest of any range in North America.

Something is definitely up at Death Valley, one of two new national parks created last fall by the California Desert Protection Act of 1994. It's also down and folded, twisted, and broken. Indeed, Death Valley is full of opposites and extremes. It may also be the best place in the West to appreciate geology, not as an abstract science, but as a primal, living force.

THE HILLS ARE ALIVE

There is the notion of following your bliss. In Death Valley, the idea is to follow the rock. The journey can take you to billion-year-old formations in Marble Canyon, or hundred-year-old mining sites up in the Panamints.

Color and form offer hints of the valley's animated geology. The greens here are not the dark shades of leafy plants but the pastels of oxidizing irons. Hidden within canyons are rocks that don't just tilt, they swirl - geology on the spin cycle. Gigantic alluvial fans, comprised of countless flows of gravel that pour out of the mountains with rains, deceptively appear frozen, seemingly in midooze.

In part, it is this ooze that has made Death Valley what it is - and, for that matter, what it isn't. As impressive as the drop from Telescope Peak to Bad-water may seem, it pales in comparison to the fact that it's another 9,000 feet from the valley floor to bedrock. Everything in between is fill, brought here on those alluvial highways, as well as by rivers that once flowed into the valley.

With so much of the place moving so much of the time, it's no wonder that after a hike in one of Death Valley's canyons, your legs will probably feel as if you had taken a walk on the beach. From afar, the alluvial fans look solid, but hike up one and you'll soon search with longing, then desperation, for a route where the rocks aren't constantly shifting beneath your feet.

One of the best hiking canyons in Death Valley is Mosaic Canyon, near Stovepipe Wells. Like many canyons in the park, this one is wide at first but becomes more labyrinthine farther up. Walls climb to hundreds of feet, and in spots where the harder rock resists the erosiveness of rushing floodwaters, the canyon narrows, forcing you to scale small dry waterfalls. Most are gradual, but a few rise almost straight up, 10 or 15 feet to terraces, separate worlds that promise new discoveries.

The marbles at Mosaic Canyon, polished by flooding, have origins in the Proterozoic era, which began nearly 1.5 billion years ago. But the Death Valley we know took form more recently.

THE BIG BANG

About 27 million years ago, Death Valley received the geological equivalent of a fresh start. Over millions of years, a series of volcanic flows buried billions of years of topography and rock. As Michael Collier puts it in his helpful guide An Introduction to the Geology of Death Valley, "Looking east from Death Valley twenty million years ago, you would have seen virtually a single seared plain stretching hundreds of miles across Nevada."

After the flows, the forces of geology went about their business in a more patient manner. Some 14 million years ago, two strike-slip faults - similar and roughly parallel to each other and to the famous San Andreas fault - began pushing up the Funeral and Black Mountains on the east side of the valley and the Panamint Range on the west. Then around four million years ago, the valley itself emerged as a fault basin, as the dueling faults literally pulled the place apart.

Still, it's difficult to visualize the movement of whole mountain ranges over millions of years. More obvious evidence that Death Valley is a work in progress can be found at Ubehebe Crater, at the park's north end. Along the road to the crater is a large debris field of dark rock. As recently as a thousand years ago, that rock filled the 750-foot-deep, 1/2-mile-wide crater that is Ubehebe. Hiking to the bottom is like trekking into the earth's history. Bands along the crater's soaring walls paint a picture of millions of years of change, in brush strokes of sedimentary and volcanic rock. It's an impressive sight, and a welcome distraction on the gravelly way back up.