Death Valley Revisited

A mile deep into a fall canyon hike in Death Valley on an elegant late-November morning, my body is fluid, working out overnight camping kinks. The crisp air is invigorating. My city brain, however, is working overtime, manufacturing fill noise to cope with a deafening silence.

For the past thirty minutes, my geologist brother and I have had the canyon to ourselves. No other humans. No birds. No sign of animals, such as the fox that flashed his red eyes at our campsite the night before. The only disruption in the deadened force enveloping us is an occasional rock dislodged by our scuffling boots. The eerie quiet is the direct result of the recently ended, annual six-month interval of searing temperatures (between 100 and 120 degrees) that broils and flattens everything in its wake here.

Fall in the Valley, however, is a blissful time to explore Earth's twisted and molded existence. The busloads of Europeans who whisk in and out during the harsh days of summer are absent. Relatively few hikers and campers are scattered about the park, enjoying the days that hover in the 60s and nights that can dip into the low 40s.

Death Valley will never be confused with Disneyland, no matter the time of year. If you are one of those people who can zip through a desert or a mountain range at 70 miles per hour without wondering about the why behind them, perhaps you needn't stray from Anaheim or Las Vegas to explore this wonderland. Rock lovers or hiking enthusiasts, though, are free to loll over the park's exposed layers, which comprise a nearly complete record of the Earth's past, jumbled out of sequence by the ages-old thumb wars played out on her tectonic plates.

Although brother Jim, a former lecturer at California State University, Bakersfield, has brought geology students here at various times of the year, he prefers the relative quiet of Thanksgiving week for his own visits. As he strides along the canyon trail with an old ski pole functioning as his walking stick, he serves as a walking guidebook to the area's rich geological history.

"Earth is dynamic, continually changing and evolving," Jim reminds me as we pick our way past rock twisted vertically over time. Such a simple statement is often lost on us non-Californians as we sit at a desk every day.

The mountains bordering Death Valley represent the divisions of geological time, relating the story of ongoing changes in the Earth's crust — vast periods of erosion and deposition, contortion, and tilting; and alternate shifting, uplifting, and lowering along faults, generating intense heat and pressure that changed the very nature of some rocks. In recent geological time, powerful forces of water, wind, and gravity have left their heavy handprints on the Valley as well.

Petroglyphs, campsites and faint foot trails provide evidence of the prehistoric hunters and gatherers who crossed through the Valley. During the winter of 1849, the first documented non-native group entered Death Valley, hoping it would provide a shortcut on the perilous, long journey to the California gold fields. The group became stuck for weeks, and suffered severe hardships.

Before this area received federal protection, mining was the primary activity. Thanks to the long-running radio and television show, Death Valley Days, which chronicled "true adventures of the Old West," the Valley is perhaps best known for the 20-mule teams that transported huge deposits of borax, a mineral used to make soap and as an industrial compound, out of here.