We arrived in Death Valley at a propitious time for the lithospherically curious. Daytime highs had just dropped from the one-teens a few days before to the upper 90s. Associated with the cool front was a freak summertime storm that passed through the night before. It dropped a whopping six-tenths of one inch of rain-- 63/100 of an inch, to be precise. It doesn’t sound like a lot but in a place where the mean annual rainfall is just over two inches, you can do the math and see that they received one-third of their rain in an evening—and in the summertime instead of the usual wintertime.
In the desert, it doesn’t take a lot of water to create flash floods. The ground is so parched that it doesn’t readily absorb water quickly introduced through precipitation. So rain has a tendency to fall in the mountains that surround valleys, like Death Valley, and run straight down canyons, acting as sluices, to the valley floor. Improbably small amounts of rainwater accumulate momentum running down mountain faces in rivulets that grow immediately into rivers that didn’t exist 15 minutes earlier. These flash floods, in turn, wash tens of thousands of tons of boulders, gravel and sand along with it. Across the face of the mountain range, dozens of small canyons all direct this slurry into a single wall of water that rushes across the valley floor. Frightfully, rain falling 10 miles to the west can result in a flood that reaches your campground in minutes, even if a drop of rain never falls directly on your rainfly.
The storm that passed through the night before we arrived closed the roadways to the northern half of the park. Some were impassable just from being covered in the silt and dust washed in by the flood. The water, over hours, will soak into the ground or evaporate and leave behind the slurry that dries to a consistency not unlike cement. Other roads buckle and crack as the force of the wash erodes the roadbed. Anything sitting in the low-lying areas of the valley in the way of the bedload of the flood gets bulldozed along for hundreds of feet—tents, 4x4s, campers, buildings, hikers. I’m not sure that the whole scope of damage was known by the time we left a few days later. But there is a well-documented flood from a similar wildcat storm around the settlement of Furnace Creek in the valley from 2004 that may act as a guide.
Death Valley is a large depression that was once the site of a large inland water body—Lake Manly, long ago disappeared—which was hemmed in on the western side by the Panamint Mountains and on the east by the Amargosa Range. It is, as you all know, the lowest place in the western hemisphere at 282 feet below sea level. Through a fascinating set of geological forces that can be explained much better by John McPhee than by me, the floor of Death Valley is subsiding while the mountain ranges framing it continue to rise. It is just one example of hundreds in this part of the country that is, geologically, referred to as the Basin & Range Province for the north-south undulations across nearly 1000 miles that lead a traveler moving east-west to the impression that they’re on a continental-sized roller coaster: up a range, down a range into a basin, up another range; relentlessly. It is what creates the pulse-quickening vistas of a single road struck out across a vast expanse of nothingness heading straight for a monumentally size slab of rock.
Understanding how all of this works over millions of years makes it occasionally hard for green-minded, tree hugging neurotic obsessives like me who are conscientious about “saving the Earth” to wonder what impact, in fact, humans will ultimately have left on the planet 100,000 years on, even if our time here ends in environmental cataclysm. The most apocalyptic ending you or I or the most creative science fiction genius could imagine will be merely a blip on the timeline. It’s a little fucking depressing.
So, enjoy it while you can. And with that in mind, we hiked into Golden Canyon. Twice, in fact: once along the sheer western escarpment of the exceedingly phallic but definitely named Manly Beacon during the late afternoon setting sun; again the next morning from the opposite face as the sun rose. I won’t do the landscape’s tactile polychromatism justice. The pictures below will do only a little bit better.
In between we camped in Furnace Creek beneath the spindly needles of a tamarisk tree. As the sun finished setting silhouetted puffs of cumulus clouds faded to shadow in an inky sky. They had been approaching from the west for an hour or two. We saw a couple flashes of lightning in the way-off distance. We wondered if there’d be more rain tonight.
It took me awhile to fall asleep. Much as I love it, I always have a bit of trepidation about sleeping in a tent. It didn’t help that the dusk seems to always bring a stiff wind in the desert. As the sun sets and the air cools, the ground gives up a tremendous amount of absorbed heat from during the day. This radiant cooling creates temperature differences across the valley and, often, strong winds. I cringed a bit while lying away for hours, reading, and watching the top of my tent bend over almost 90 degrees and wondering when we’d go tumbling across the salt pan in it.
It took me awhile to realize the wind blowing through the tamarisk tree above our tent wasn't the whoosh of cars passing by on the road. We weren't even near enough to the road to hear cars as I thought about it.
After midnight, the wind died down and, finally, I drifted off.
At 1:00 A.M. what sounded like a gaggle of school children laughing and screaming at recess came from somewhere outside the tent. I awoke with a faint sense of startlement and disorientation. For a minute I thought I was back in my apartment with the sound of children drifting up and over the lip of my windowsill from the PS 125 schoolyard below at noon. (The moon was brightly lighting the tent now that the sky had been blown clear.) Then I remembered the tent and began to wonder what I could have been dreaming that reminded me of kids yelling and carrying on. But as the fog of sleep burned off a bit more I heard the sound again and realized I really was hearing something like baying children. My heart beat into my throat.
Now I have been to the desert only once before. And I’ve never heard a coyote before. But very quickly I settled on the notion that I was hearing baying coyotes. They didn't sound like the classic movie coyotes. (Do they ever? Cue the moon; cue the howl.) I listened closely and discerned two distinct sounds. One was a group of high-pitched whining and howling coyotes—truly like a crowd of children. And they were close by—certainly somewhere in the campground. Whenever they died down, a deeper, lone howl way off in the distance clear across the salt pan would wail. And the group nearby would respond. This went back and forth for a while. Was it a group of pups, wandered off, howling for their mother? Was she chastening them? After awhile, eerie, unnerving silence. I tell you—teeth chattering—I couldn’t stand it.
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