11/16 Titus Canyon: Death Valley National Park, California

Titus Canyon is in Death Valley National Park. The Titus Canyon Road is about 26 miles long. The road is one-way and rough gravel. The park service recommends that only vehicles with high clearance, 4-wheel drive, and good tires use this road. Luckily, I have a 4-wheel drive SUV with decent tires.

My oldest sister, Bonnie, and her partner, Carl, were visiting me when we drove through Titus Canyon.

Just as you make the turn-off to Titus Canyon, you see this stair-step cliff. It is what remains of the Bullfrog Mine in Nevada. It was an open-pit gold mine.  My friend, Walter, worked there for twelve years.

Maybe, you thought, like I did, that Death Valley National Park was just a bunch of sand and cactuses in the desert. I found out right away, that it's not. There are sand dunes in Death Valley, but they are not very extensive. Most of Death Valley is rocks, many different kinds of rock. There are sedimentary, metamorphic and igneous rocks in Death Valley. We saw them all in Titus Canyon.

We could often see the layers of different kinds of rocks that were laid down millions of years ago when Death Valley was filled with water. Can you see the layers of rock here? They were laid down flat and then millions of years later, volcanic forces lifted them up tilting and twisting the layers in many different directions.

This is Red Pass. Some people say that Death Valley is just brown, but the rocks in Death Valley come in shades of colors that I have never seen before, including my favorite rocks which were green!

From Red Pass, we could see the Titus Canyon Road wandering in the valley below. Somewhere in that valley was the town of Leadfield. It existed for less than six months!

300 people lived in Leadfield during its very short life.

With few trees around for building material, houses and other building were constructed from rocks and metal sheeting. This house was about 16 square feet in size and a little over 5 feet tall.

The Leadfield buildings in this photo are constructed of sheet metal which is now very rusted. Those tall gray hills are tailings from the mine. (Tailings are the dirt and rocks that are removed from a mine.) We ate lunch in Leadfield then continued on our way.

Here you can see that when the volcanic process got going, it pushed the cliff up, breaking up the rock layer that was there and filling the spaces between the broken rock with a white rock. You can also see that the bottom part of these cliffs were eroded by water because they are round and smooth.

Here is a close-up of the white rock filling up the spaces between pieces of black rock.

Incredible!

See the person standing near the canyon wall? See my black SUV in the distance?

These rock layers were once on the bottom of a lake, but volcanic forces pushed them up, distorted the layers and turned the sedimentary rocks into metamorphic rocks! 

We didn't see many cactuses, but we did see a lot of this desert rock nettle. It stings if you touch it, just like the species of nettle we have in the midwest!

Those rock walls are a few hundred feet high! It looks like we are going to drive right into them!

 These rock walls are high enough that the top of the rock walls is in sunlight, while the bottom is in shade!

Amazing!

Now we're at the mouth of the canyon! It was an amazing drive!