Death Valley Days

You will have to forgive me for this post. I am actually posting something that happened last weekend, even though I mentioned it in my post last weekend. But I'm going to tell you about my field trip to Death Valley.

You will also have to forgive me because I know that blog posts about vacations are boring. When I read vacation posts, I think, "Well, that's nice for them, but so what for me?" But I understand why people like to post them, because they are interesting to the poster. So since I find it interesting, I'm going to post it.

You also have to forgive me because I am not a photographer. I just have a cheap point-and-shoot camera I got five years ago, and I'm not good at taking pictures anyway. Also, I think some sand got in my camera, causing the little lens screen thing to not function quite properly, so sometimes the pictures are a little obscured.

On Friday, November 2, our class met at 7:30 a.m. to prepare to go on our trip. We all (about thirty of us) piled into four vans and one pickup truck. These are twelve-passenger vans, so it was pretty roomy. I was in the van with my professor, our TA, and four classmates, one of whom is the TA's younger brother. We headed south, our professor pointing out faceted spurs and cinder cones along the way.

We stopped at a church parking lot in St. George for lunch. We had to go to the St. George Temple Visitors' Center to use the restrooms. Then we got back in the vans until we got to our next resting spot at a Las Vegas gas station.

Then we made it to our destination in Death Valley. For some reason they kept our location quite hush-hush all through the semester, but I knew where we were going because of rumors. Thus when our professor said, "Welcome to Death Valley," there were some jokes like, "Oh, is that where we are?" This was our first stop. I think it's called Dante's View. You can see all the deposited sediments on the valley floor and the alluvial fans. Death Valley is in the Basin and Range Province. The valleys form because the continent is extending. As air from the coast hits the mountains, it rises up, dries out, and comes down again drier and warmer. Hence the reason Death Valley is the warmest place in the U.S.

We went to our campsite near Stovepipe Wells. We set up our tents (I was about to set mine up but someone invited me to share a tent) and we had a dinner of hot dogs and bratwurst. There was a kangaroo rat running around trying to catch any food we dropped. That night, many of us went out to the Mesquite Flat Sand Dunes. The moon was bright, and since we weren't near a city, it was easy to see the stars. It was a beautiful night, and as I was lying in the sand with my shoes off, I looked up at the night sky and thought of how amazing it was. It's amazing to think that there are billions and billions of stars out there and we can see them, even though they're so far away!

The next morning, all of us went back to the dunes. We had to analyze the sand formation. The dunes--at least part of them--are pretty young, which we know because they have a lot of things besides quartz, such as feldspar and magnetite. The dunes had varying sizes and directions of ripple marks. Unfortunately, I'm not too good at understanding the relationship between saltation and ripple formation. We looked at the sand particles, and at the interdunes (the flat place between dunes) some of us licked pieces of the ground to discover that it had a clayey texture (it stuck to our tongues). We found a kangaroo rat den, which shows differing layers of the dune.

We climbed to the biggest dune. I'm glad I'm in better shape than I used to be!

The Mesquite dunes are transverse dunes, which means that there's a lot of sand and one prevailing wind direction. As a kid, we used to go to some dunes near Flowell (Fillmore) at Easter. Those were barchan dunes. Barchan and transverse dunes basically form the same way, except that transverse dunes have a large sand supply.

We went and saw this formation. I believe these are clays, which is why they erode like this. And there is igneous material (I can't remember if it's ash or cinders or something else) on the top.

We went and ate lunch on a road. That location had very soft ground that consisted of volcanic cinders underlain by volcanic ash.

Then we drove for about an hour on an extremely bumpy road to get to my favorite location on the trip. This place is called the Racetrack. It's a playa (a dry lake bed, from the Spanish word for beach). Which is pretty cool by itself.

But this is no ordinary playa. All over the ground are rocks, some of which apparently are as big as 800 pounds. And they move! No one has ever seen them move, and no one is quite sure why they do. But they definitely move and leave tracks. One theory is that it is so flat that when it gets wet, it gets really slick and wind can push the rocks along. Another theory (which makes more sense to me) is that it freezes over on occasion, which obviously reduces the friction and the rocks can slide. But it still remains a mystery.

The woman in the pink is our professor.

We stood on a mountain (covered in rocks with a "rip-your-pants" texture--I think it was chemically eroded limestone, but I could be remembering wrong) from which these rocks originated. I think the photographer on the right side of this picture is the one someone apologized to (since there were thirty of us in his picture), but he said he needed us in his pictures because he worked with a BYU grad.

The texture of this playa was different from what we would see in other places.

Then we drove back on the bumpy road for another hour. I'm kind of glad the road is so bumpy because it prevents dumb, irresponsible people from messing with such an awesome place. Then we went and looked at some volcanic craters. There were sediments deposited, and a magma chamber came up through the sediments. It was mafic magma (meaning it has a lot of magnesium and iron), which tends to be more peaceful than silicic magma (like Mt. St. Helens), but there was a lake here, which resulted in a big explosion (when mafic magma mixes with water, it becomes explosive, which is why the Iceland volcano a few years ago was so disastrous). On top of all the sediments are cinders and I think ash.

We headed back to our campground and ate fajitas and visited with a transient (in a positive sense) named Ken at the next campsite over. I guess he was lonely so he came and visited us for a long time.

The next day was Sunday, and surprisingly we as BYU students were out doing things. We followed the roads on alluvial fans. We came and visited this area, called the Devil's Golf Course (one of my classmates said, "We're so mean to the devil"). I believe this is also a playa, and I think these are basaltic rocks. Water occasionally deposits halite on top. I couldn't help licking the deposits a few times.

This is a bad picture, but I was glad to see an example of olivine in its natural habitat. Olivine is a green mineral in mafic lava--the more mafic it is, the more olivine there is. I hope this is olivine--if it's not, I'll be disappointed.

Then we headed to another playa, Badwater Basin. If you look closely, you can see a sign on the mountain that indicates where sea level is.

Badwater Basin gets more water than Devil's Golf Course (probably because of its elevation), so the salt is more a result of dissolution than it is of deposition. The halite was easier to lick here. Strangely, this week I was in the geology computer lab, and the computers around me had screensavers of different locations, one of which was here. It gave me the strangest cravings. I think it was the first time I've had a craving for an entire location. It sure was tasty!

Our final stop in Death Valley was near this ghost mine (Death Valley used to be used to mine borax). It was really hot; I would guess it was in the 90s. We ate some lunch and had a brief devotional before heading out.

On our way back, I introduced my fellow passengers to the Lower Lights. We stopped in Vegas at an In-N-Out. I was surprised that the one day we went out to eat was a Sunday. I was a heathen with my class and bought some food (some others just ate leftover food on the truck); I justified it because I needed to use the restroom and I would feel bad doing so without being a customer. Someone jokingly said that we might as well be drinking coffee, since we were already breaking a commandment. Then we headed back (making another gas station stop in Beaver), and we arrived in Provo at about 9:00.

I know you might not think it sounded that fun, but it really was. I think there's just something fun about a weekend-long field trip with a class. It was fun to be with all these geology people when I'm an English Language major. I could pick up a rock and examine it without anyone looking at me funny. It kind of made me sad I'm not a scientist. But then I think of all the chemistry, physics, and math I would have to take, and I think, "Nah. I'm good."