Upon learning that my dad and brother had never been to Death Valley, I decided to give them the grand one-day tour. Between the Prius and flood damage from the severe rains last October, much of the valley was inaccessible to us but we covered many of the classic spots in one ambitious day. We entered the park from Panamint Valley and ultimately exited the park out the Amargosa Valley, since the south road was closed. First stop was Mesquite Dunes before the heat of the day kicked in. I happily kicked off my shoes and strolled barefoot out to the highest dune, surveyed the land, and then ran back down.
With a hot tip that Grotto Canyon was a worthwhile place to go, we
carefully drove the low-riding Prius up the dirt road to the mouth of
the canyon. We saw good flowers along the walk, some interesting
beetles, and a surprising number of chuckwallas. The chuckwallas would balance on their hind legs, resembling meercats, to reach and eat purple flowers. I'd never seen anything like it and sat in awe as a foot-long lizard happily eat flowers to hearts content about five feet away from me. Highly entertaining!
We continued up the canyon through three distinct narrows to the based of a 30ft dryfalls. This involved some creative climbing and I was glad I brought some webbing for an impromptu handline. Each narrow got progressively better. It was not until the way back down that the geology sunk in for me: each of these narrows was carved through an ancient rock avalanche deposit and not the hanging wall of a low-angle normal fault. This was quite the surprise but reassured me that there must be more rock avalanches lurking out in Death Valley, misinterpreted as fault rock hangingwalls on low-angle normal faults. Suddenly an excuse to do fieldwork out here sometime! Another quick stop after was to see the remarkably active pupfish at the perrenial Salt Creek.
After a short stop-in at the refugee camp of a visitor center, we escaped out to Devil's Golf Course for the fantastically inhospitable salt landscape, an area of fantastic shapes and patterns formed by the expanding, contracting, heaving, and melting of salt.
The Badwater parking lot was just about maxed out so we made a short stop of it. Surprise, surprise. Another intriguingly large mass of fractured rock with jigsaw and block-in-matrix textures lurking in plain sight directly above Badwater. A two minute detour off the Artist's Drive Road revealed yet another long runout rock avalanche deposit. Death Valley keeps getting more interesting! We had a short walk around Artist's Palette, an particularly colorful assortment of hydrothermally altered rocks. I was impressed to see fresh evidence of high water marks 8 feet up from the October flash flood. It's amazing how well the features were preserved. Also saw some more excellent flowers.
Now that the heat of the day was nearly past, we drove to Zabriskie Point to catch the view of the badlands. I dropped my brother and dad off with the simple instructions of "walk downstream" until they appeared on the vast flats of Death Valley. I then drove the car to the Gower Gulch fan and walked up until I met them. The walk makes for a nice, all downhill stroll through muddy badlands, a steep and narrow canyon, and then out a narrow mouth and down the large fan to the car. The trip was made even better by the fact that the October flood turned the washbed into a concrete-hard silty surface, perfect for walking on. A mountain bike would have been amazing (though illegal...). After a bite to eat we called it a day, driving out east of the park and miraculously finding an abandoned trailer park to camp at. We enjoyed a perfectly calm and clear evening, until around midnight, a cold and vigorous wind came out of nowhere and persisted throughout the night. None of us slept well as there was not much we could do. The next day's drive was uneventful if windy. A quick stop in Wrightwood on the way back netted some nice actinolite boulders for the yard. Thanks to my dad and brother for the short escape. It was good to get out for some geology, flowers, and flower-eating lizards.
