Cave Rock Spring

Looking out to the Bullfrog Hills, camp at left, from the cave.

The eastern part of Death Valley National Park is an empty triangle jutting into the state of Nevada, and it is lovely for many reasons, but perhaps most of all for its isolation. Most of the roads in this Nevada Triangle are seldom travelled more than a few times a year, and wherever you go, your tire tracks are likely to be among the first in quite some time, even on busy weekends. If you camp out here, the closest people are likely to be in the ghost town of Rhyolite, which has several full time residents.

This spring is a bygone remnant of centuries of occupation by natives and prospectors, but most recently as hosting the workers of the Happy Hooligan Mine nearby. I didn't do any exploration of this mine on this trip, it was just too windy to persuade us to do an in-depth exploration, but that just leaves a reason to return. This corner of the park is so rarely visited that during this week of prolific flower blooms and incredible greenery throughout the region the road was in places completely overgrown with fresh sprouts, and at times we had to get out and find the road alignment out of the greenery. We set up camp after momentarily getting lost in the maze of roads below and found a naturally windproof cave in the cliff nearby and saw it as an opportunity to get out of said extreme winds for a while. We brought the stove and our chairs and enjoyed the solace and solitude of a peaceful evening surrounded by the fire-blackened cave walls used by centuries of people before us. 

Death Valley Petroglyphs: "Spectre Wash"

Spirit Bighorn

Once again out in the remote wild lands that compose most of Western Death Valley, we stumbled upon a site I have found little documentation on. Interestingly, it currently has no vandalism anywhere, though equally interesting was the lack of lithic scatter at the site, or flecks from point making by the natives.

The rock here is a porous basalt/andesite, and the petroglyphs here were very deep, and many were also clearly very very old. Many of them were completely varnished over, detectable only by standing at the right angle with the sun glare exposing the divots where the glyph is. 

Panels here were largely Coso in style, with a few bighorns and a few anthropomorphic people in the mix as well. More recent glyphs are probably from the Timbisha Shoshone, a few hundred to over a thousand years, while the oldest are likely at least 8,000 years old.

Death Valley Petroglyphs: "Lithos Canyon"

One of many large panels in the canyon.

Perched in a remote canyon in the high deserts above Death Valley National Park is a stunning remnant of peoples who were here long before us. This is one of the most impressive petroglyph sites I have visited; with the quiet, dark canyon walls backed by the towering granite mountains behind. Entire herds of pecked-in bighorn sheep of the Coso style, and endless anthropomorphs (human-like) and abstract designs, punctuated by spirals and sunbursts. The petroglyphs are peppered with signs of much later life; miner and rancher graffiti also appears in this canyon, and most of it is quite old, though overshadowed by the tremendous age and complexity of these ancient drawings whose meaning will probably never be known for certain.

Hot Springs Canyon

3rd falls

A popular campground, a dry climate, huge springs, and a rarely visited canyon. Hot Springs Canyon is a unique canyon in this part of the Santa Ana mountains. Deep, twisting narrows harboring a nearly year-round stream with a rich riparian habitat that is paralleled only to the north at Harding Canyon, and to the south beyond the Santa Margarita River, but is unique in the Ortega Corridor. I've been here several times, and every time I find it more amazing. There are four waterfalls before a large impassable fall down about 20 feet into a deep pool that would require rock climbing to bypass, each one a demonstration of the beauty of water. Once I was even here when the depths of the summer drowned this idyllic location and followed a muddy trough until the first deep pool and turned back due to the heat. Not even this horrific dryness took away from the amazing island of verdancy this canyon boasts. These pictures are from three trips; one on December 24, one in January, and one in August.

Shrubbery

Trabuco Canyon to Los Piños Peak

 I continue to rave about the wonderful jewel of California the Santa Ana Mountains are, and Trabuco canyon continues to remain a center of beauty and exploration for many of the range's visitors. On this visit, I made a long slog from the end of the road all the way up to the crest of the mountains at Los Piños Peak, the fourth highest in the area. It was a drizzly December day, and with a late start, we set out for 10.7 miles with about 2800 feet of elevation gain.

The weather was drizzly and windy, the clouds brushing the tops of the peaks and enveloping us at the top. Small amounts of hail and rain were a stark contrast to the heat we had endured last time on Los Piños peak. Instead of a sweeping view across California, I was treated with a mystic, almost forbidding dome of cloud shrouding the view from me. It was surreal.

The Devil's Postpile National Monument

The Devil's Postpile

It's one of California's most unique landmarks: the towering columns of columnar basalt looming high over the valley floor is a postcard image for California and the National Park system. Devil's Postpile is a national monument in the Eastern Sierra Nevada Mountains and is a hotspot for tourism between May and November. But enough introduction now, and on to the really interesting part: the geology!

Return to Marble Canyon

The famous crossroads sign at Marble Canyon

My most recent trip was mostly return visits, and since I've written on the exploration of Marble Canyon before, I figured I could now write the Informing part of it. This part of the Cottonwoods, including Marble and Cottonwood Canyons, is almost entirely end-paleozoic era limestones and marbles between 350 and 290 million years old. A lot of the rock along the canyon includes black balls and lumps of a microcrystalline chert. These result from colonies of algae that have fossilized and stand out prominently against the grey limestone.