Death Valley Days

DEATH VALLEY, CALIFORNIA–All geologists love Death Valley. No other place on Earth has such extraordinarily diverse geology combined with a modern infrastructure and a century of scientific study. The Wooster Geologists had a spectacular time in and around the valley today. Here we are above with the traditional group shot at Badwater. The weather could not have been better.

We left the Desert Studies Center at Zzyzx just after breakfast and drove through Baker and Shoshone to the southern end of Death Valley, seeing many wonderful sites. After lunch at the new National Park Service Furnace Creek Visitor Center, we then drove east and up out of the valley to Zabriskie Point. The above view has been published countless times by geologists and nature enthusiasts, but it has not lost its graphic power. We are looking here to the west at deeply eroded lake sediments of the Furnace Creek Formation. Towards the back of the light-colored material you can just make out the black streak of a basaltic intrusion.

I think the other side of Zabriskie Point — the side looking out over Death Valley — is even more impressive. We see again the Furnace Creek Formation lake sediments, this time with alluvial deposits on top (visible on the right). These materials accumulated in an ancient lake and were lifted up and tilted by the tremendous faulting that formed Death Valley. The pinnacle is called Manly Beacon.

We took advantage of the sunlight and high spirits to take a picture of our Desert Geology 2013 students.

We continued east and then south to Dante’s View, where we looked down into Death Valley from the dizzy heights. In this image we see Telescope Peak towering at 11,049 feet of elevation, while much of the valley floor below is lower than sealevel.

Looking straight down from Dante’s View to Badwater (on the far right), we can see a complete alluvial fan from the narrow channel in the mountain slope to the spreading apron of debris over the salt pan on the valley floor. Badwater Road skirts the periphery of the fan.

After Dante’s View, we continued east and returned to Zzyzx via Death Valley Junction, Shoshone and Baker. Again, I can think of nowhere else one can see so much geological diversity in a single day, from the steamy floor of Death Valley to the heights above where we could walk through patches of snow.