Mike Ball

We’re back in the campground where we spent the first night, and again we have wind shaking the camper and rattling the windows. They say a cold front is coming through and it will be at least 10° cooler tomorrow. If the weather is nasty, we might give up and start home a day early. I’d like to make a quick visit to Owens Valley just to see the place that Los Angeles steals its water. We’ll see tomorrow.

We started today by coming south and visiting Salt Creek, which is a spring-fed marsh and creek of heavily salinated water. There are some small fish called “desert pupfish” living in it. It’s a totally isolated ecosystem. The water comes from springs at the base of an alluvial fan, runs along the surface for a while, then runs out into the desert where it quickly sinks into another alluvial deposit. It turns out that there are a number of disconnected ecosystems where pupfish live. All are slightly different varieties that separated from each other when the lake that had covered death valley dried up. One can trace the drying process by noting when the fish differentiated from one another.

After that, we visited the Borax Museum at Furnace Creek. It was a small mineral museum that at least showed samples of the different kinds of borax-containing minerals, and explained just what borax is. It was worth the 10 minutes or so that it took to see it. I had to get out though, because it was hard to keep my mouth shut as the proprietor was giving a lecture about fiber optics to a visitor. He had a couple of small facts right, and an enormous amount of bull tacked on to make some point that I never quite understood. I did notice that the visitor wasn’t really paying much attention, and that’s just as well.

We also visited Badwater, the lowest car-accessable point in the US. There’s a spring there, and the water is drinkable but very heavily mineralized. It’s right next to the huge salt pan the makes up the lower half of death valley. Moisture comes to the surface and evaporates, leaving thick deposits of salt mixed with gravel. In some places it’s a thousand feet thick. They say you can hear it talking when temperatures change. I found it quite impressive.

The spring is home to some slugs, or so they say. Those white patches you see are salt deposits forming in the middle of the water. Like most springs here, the aquifer is at the bottom of an alluvial fan. Apparently the rivers here all run at the bottom of large collections of rocks. When it rains, the rocks get washed out into fans like the ones you see in the background here.

As sunset approached, we went to Zabriski Point, which looks onto a series of heavily folded badlands formation. Light and dark rock interleave in vertical stripe to make wonderful shapes. Since the rock is laid down in layers, think of how much it must have deformed to make the layers verticle as they are here.

On the other side we can see somewhat different badlands. In the back you can see the dark volcanic capstone that holds some of in place.

Zabriski Point was one of the few formations I knew of in Death Valley before we went, though I’d heard all of the legendary names. There was a movie called Zabriski Point that I remember seeing in the early 70’s. It wasn’t very good, sort of a hippy road movie that made it’s points with a sledgehammer, but I remembered the name and the photography of the area..

Now, it’s back to the parking lot for another night.