Recently we made the move from Idaho to Nevada. Part of the tradeoff from the move included the ability to drive from the relatively high elevation cold temperature basin and range country to the lowest spot in the country, Death Valley, within a few hours. As the forecast for this weekend included snow at the new home in Nevada, I thought to take advantage of the nice weather I expected at -200 ft elevation of Standpipe Wells.
The drive from our neck of the woods to Death Valley involves a relatively uneventful trip south through Tonopah and then Beatty Nevada. This is the southern edge of the Nevada basin and range where the topography makes the transition to more subdued alluvial fill basins separating widely spaced mountains. The total elevation drop is something like 6700 feet in a three and a half hour drive. The majority of the drop is in the final thirty miles out of Beatty and down the mountain range into Death Valley. My ears popped the entire way down.
Yawning and chewing gum on the Daylight Pass road into Death Valley, the basin opens up with a wide view of Standpipe Wells to the southwest and Furnace Creek to the south. The mountains to each side are rich in complex structural geology, including on peak to the north that is suffuciently faulted to be called Corkscrew Peak. The road comes over the pass onto a steep alluvial fan, maybe a six percent grade. Large boulders litter the slope at the top of the fan and grades to smaller and smaller rock as you drive toward the valley basin. Occasional monolithic outcrops emerge from the smooth alluvial fan, very out of place blocks rotating out from the faulted basin fringes. The driver slows down to a turtles pace to navigate the road placed in a channel eroded from just such a block called Mud Canyon.
The road makes an unnecessarily complex set of turns that allows you to head north to Scotty's castle, south to Furnace creek or continue west to Stovepipe Wells.
Stovepipe Wells is a little outpost composed of a motel, gas station, campground and ranger station. The last time we visited, we stayed the night at the motel. As with any national park hotel it was insanely overpriced and provide an adequate living space. In late October, when the rest of the country is facing the pre-Halloween blizzard, Stovepipe Wells is the perfect temperature. There is little better than waking up at seven am to find the sun edging over the surrounding mountains casting the entire valley in the soft glow of the dawn magic hour.
Right down the road there is a dirt road forging up the alluvial fan to the south toward the base of the towering Tucki Mountain. The gravel parking lot at the top of the road is at the outlet of Mosaic Canyon. When I visited there was blue skies with a hint of black storm cloud sending feelers over the top of the mountain and a whole parking lot full of cars. Now Mosaic Canyon is one of those amazing little features that funnels an entire mountain range's worth of runoff through a two foot wide and twenty foot deep canyon...maybe once or twice a year when the rain comes. My concern at the time was that the rain clouds that were ominously rumbling up at the peak of the mountain were preparing to send a wave of water, trees, rocks and tourists down the trail at me.
The geology of the canyon was great. The reason folks go to Mosaic Canyon is because of the butter smooth marble walls of the lower canyon. The marble is truly beautiful with alternating bands of orange, cream, and dark brown - if it weren't in a national park, they would be making counters from the stuff. The periodic water and gravel abrasions scalloped and ground the marble to the point where it became "soft" as a youngster exclaimed as he slid down one of the walls. The good stuff was all within a quarter mile of the parking lot.
The marble is not the only interesting geology. There was a fine grained matrix supported coarse, angular clast conglomerate that could be found at the upper contact of the marble, although it could also have been lithified alluvium or possibly volcanoclastic. Large pumice boulders were occasionally sticking out of the canyon wall above the marble. Higher up the canyon mineralized ironstones and quartz laden metasedimentary rocks litterered the canyon floor. The slopes lining the canyon walls were red metasedimentary rocks and looked mineralized but I did not see evidence of mining. The canyon became unaccessible about a mile up from the parking lot at a steep cliff that would have been a challenge to free climb.
The next destination was to find a camp site and maybe check out some of the old mining that happened at Death Valley. Continuing on the road going west from Standpipe Wells, the highway skirts an alluvial fan gaining elevation quickly until it is a bit above two thousand feet at Emigrant, a campground and rest stop. From there, take the Emmigrant Canyon Road and follow it, gaining elevation the entire way. At one point the foundation of an old mill appears on the south side of the road and the gravel road to Skidoo is about a mile later.
The gravel road to Skidoo is a winding, clothes washed rutted, and occasionally blasted from a sheer cliff face. A few miles from the road entrance the telltale piles of rock betray the presence of mining. Some of the infrastructure has even been preserved by the park staff. This small head frame still has the sixty foot shaft is still open and timber supported with a serviceable ladder. The entrance itself had been blocked by a cable mesh rock bolted to the shaft walls.
A number of exploration holes were present and curiously followed a outcrop of a quartz vein in the granite bedrock. A little shack was built on the other side of the valley. The mineralization I could find in the piles were open vein fill crystals of some white mineral that had a botryoidal habit. There were small yellow sulfide crystals mixed in, possibly pyrite or tetrahedrite and a dark accessory mineral in the white quartz veins. It looked a lot like the gold vein I found with a metal detctor in Quartzite a few years back.
Continuing down the road, I discovered the town of Skidoo, an old mining town at the top of the world above the Death Valley. There was a sign marking the site and hundreds of mine workings in the surrounding hills. All the buildings had been removed and there was no visible evidence that the place had once been home to dozens of large buildings less than one hundred years ago. The sign did have a few black and white pictures of the valley from the the towns heyday. Investigation of the quite large workings in the granite nearby showed backfilled trenches or gated adits.
Here is a nice one pager website on Skidoo.
I ended up camping nearby that was certainly not in the posted "Day use only: No camping" area. I set up our large family tent on a roughly flat area before the looming clouds and dark arrived. Between the elevation and oncoming storm it became quite cold. Despite the four season tent and Idaho-class cold weather gear I ended up having a bad night. The wind blew the tent down, although to be fair, the water stayed mostly outside.
When the sun finally came over the horizon it was still raining and gusty. I managed to stuff the sleeping gear and muddy tent into the back of the jeep and get off the mountain before the rain turned to snow. The bad weather really put a damper on the plan to hike out to some of the more remote mine workings.
On the way out I snapped a picture of the Mesquite Flats Sand Dunes during the rain and it can be compared to the picture I took a few months ago when the weather was ideal.
Normal
With Rain
Ron and I were there the middle of February and it was 80-90 degrees during the day and 35-40 at night. The flowers were blooming everywhere and grass was just beginning to turn the valleys green. You will truly enjoy that. Sorry to hear your tent blew down!
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