Death Valley

The valley floor here is a crust of salt, the residue of water that pooled and dried with no outlet to escape to. The ground lies below the level of the sea, low enough that what little rain falls runs down to this spot and then has nowhere to go but up into the air. The salt is laid out in a rough honeycomb of ridges where the crust has buckled and grown.

A little north of the lowest floor, the same salt stands up in a field of jagged, ankle-high spires. Here the crust has been eaten and rebuilt into rock-hard pinnacles rather than a smooth pan, all of it salt and mud dried past the point of giving. Walk out onto it and the ground crunches underfoot.

From this overlook the land falls away in bare, wrinkled ridges of golden rock, worn into a maze of gullies with not a plant to soften them. These are old layers of mud and fine sediment, laid down flat long ago, then lifted and tilted and left for the rare rains to carve. Because nothing grows on them, every fold and cut stands out clean.

The sharp golden peak rising out of the badlands below Zabriskie Point is Manly Beacon, a tougher mass of the same tilted sediment left standing while softer rock washed away around it. It is the same stuff you see everywhere here, just hard enough to hold its ground. It makes a natural landmark over the maze of canyons at its foot.

This trailhead leads on foot into the same golden badlands you see from the rim above, but from the inside. Walking up the wash you pass between walls of the same tilted rock, close enough to touch, cut and smoothed by the rare floods that come through. The canyon reads like a cross-section of the whole hillside.

At the head of Golden Canyon a wall of rust-red rock rises above the pale badlands. The red marks a different band within the same stacked sediment, its color set apart from the gold around it. Against the surrounding rock it stands as the back wall of the canyon.

On the face of the hills here the rock breaks into patches of green, pink, and pale purple, bare mineral color with no plants to interrupt it. The tints are the rock’s own chemistry showing through where nothing covers it. The band of colors runs across the slope in soft, unlikely shades.

At the north end of the valley the ground drops away into a wide, deep crater with steeply banded walls. Whatever tore it open cut straight down through the layered ground, and those layers now stand exposed all around the bowl. It is a clean slice through the desert’s stacked history, opened all at once instead of worn away slowly.

From this high pull-out on the range crest the whole basin lies open below, the white salt floor running the length of the valley with the bare ranges walled up on either side. From here the shape of the place makes sense at a glance: a block of ground dropped low between mountains that are still rising. There is no green to blur the lines.

Just north of Furnace Creek stand the remains of a works where crews once processed borax scraped off the valley floor. The salt flats that make the desert look dead were, to the miners, a chemical crop, borax left behind by the same drying that made the salt pans. Hauled out by long wagon teams, it was the valley’s rock chemistry turned into cargo.