The Explorer's Guide to Death Valley National Park - Softcover

Bryan, T. Scott; Tucker-Bryan, Betty

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1607323400 ISBN 13: 9781607323402

Verlag: University Press of Colorado, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

Originally published in 1995, soon after Death Valley National Park became the fifty-third park in the US park system, The Explorer's Guide to Death Valley National Park was the first complete guidebook available for this spectacular area.

Now in its third edition, this is still the only book that includes all aspects of the park. Much more than just a guidebook, it covers the park's cultural history, botany and zoology, hiking and biking opportunities, and more. Information is provided for all of Death Valley's visitors, from first-time travelers just learning about the area to those who are returning for in-depth explorations.

The book includes updated point-to-point logs for every road within and around the park, as well as more accurate maps than those in any other publication. With extensive input from National Park Service resource management, law enforcement, and interpretive personnel, as well as a thorough bibliography for suggested reading, The Explorer's Guide to Death Valley National Park, Third Edition is the most up-to-date, accurate, and comprehensive guide available for this national treasure.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

T. Scott Bryan was a seasonal employee at Yellowstone National Park from 1970 through 1986. In addition to his studies in Yellowstone, he has been to geyser fields throughout the contiguous United States, Mexico, Japan, Fiji, New Zealand, and the Valley of Geysers on the Kamchatka Peninsula of Russia, leading the first-ever US study group there in 1991. Betty Tucker-Bryan is the founder of the Death Valley Hikers Association and has written numerous books and articles on the outdoors.

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The Explorer's Guide to Death Valley National Park

By T. Scott Bryan, Betty Tucker-Bryan

University Press of Colorado

Copyright © 2014 University Press of Colorado
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-60732-340-2

Contents

List of Maps, 
List of Tables, 
Foreword to the First Edition by Superintendent Edwin L. Rothfuss, 
Acknowledgments, 
INTRODUCTION: An Introduction to Death Valley National Park and Vicinity, 
Part I. Geological, Human, and Natural History, 
CHAPTER 1. Geologic History, 
CHAPTER 2. Native American Cultures, 
CHAPTER 3. Explorers, Prospectors, and Miners, 
CHAPTER 4. Tourism and the National Park, 
CHAPTER 5. Plantlife, 
CHAPTER 6. Wildlife, 
Part II. The Death Valley Environment, 
CHAPTER 7. The Desert Environment: Climate, Precautions, and Regulations for Explorers of Death Valley, 
Part III. Exploring Death Valley National Park by Foot and Bicycle, 
CHAPTER 8. Hiking and Backpacking in Death Valley, 
CHAPTER 9. Bicycling in Death Valley, 
Part IV. Trip Route Road Logs, 
CHAPTER 10. An Introduction to the "Trip Route" Road Logs, 
CHAPTER 11. Southern Death Valley, 
CHAPTER 12. South-Central Death Valley, 
CHAPTER 13. Eastern Areas and Amargosa Valley, 
CHAPTER 14. North-Central Death Valley, 
CHAPTER 15. Western Areas, including the "Wildrose Country", 
CHAPTER 16. Panamint Valley Areas, 
CHAPTER 17. Northern Death Valley, 
CHAPTER 18. Big Pine Road and Eureka Valley, 
CHAPTER 19. Racetrack Valley and Hunter Mountain, 
CHAPTER 20. Saline Valley Road, including Lee Flat, 
CHAPTER 21. Nevada Triangle, 
Appendixes, 
Suggested Reading, 
About the Authors, 
Index, 
Death Valley Wilderness and Backcountry Stewardship Plan of 2013, 

CHAPTER 1

Geologic History

THE SETTING

Death Valley National Park has an extraordinarily long and complex geologic history. Its most ancient rocks are more than 1.8 billion years old, whereas its youngest are forming today. They have been folded, faulted, and recrystallized in every imaginable way, inundated by volcanic lava and ash beds, and deeply sliced by erosion. The result is a wonderland that represents both the driest part of the Great Basin and the most extreme portion of the Basin and Range.

The Great Basin is a geographic region that covers parts of Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, and California. It is defined by its climate and hydrology. Heavy rain and snow may fall in the mountains, but the intervening valleys are dry because of the storm-blocking "rain shadow" effect of its mountain ranges. Streams draining the slopes simply soak into the ground or evaporate. None of the rivers reaches the ocean. In the spring and early summer there is sometimes enough runoff to form small lakes on the valley floors, but they soon dry up in the summer heat, leaving behind shimmering playas — barren lake beds of salt and clay.

The Basin and Range is the geologic province that formed the Great Basin's mountains. The crust of the earth was uplifted and stretched under severe tension, and large-scale fault zones broke it into a series of parallel north-south-trending valleys and ranges that march east one after another from the Sierra Nevada Mountains in California to central Utah, north into Idaho and Wyoming, and south through Arizona into Mexico.

The Basin and Range is geologically young — less than 65 million years old. Its development began in Utah. As time went on the action gradually migrated westward and produced greater relief. Because it is nearly westernmost in the province, the Death Valley region boasts some of the youngest and most extreme topography of all the Basin and Range. Its mountains are still growing taller, and the valleys are becoming deeper. Rock exposures are fresh and reveal nearly every variety of stone that exists. The rocks in one mountain range are often completely different from those a few miles away, and sometimes the age difference can vary a billion years in only a few inches. Great earthquakes and volcanic eruptions have torn the surface. Ice Age lakes filled the valleys with hundreds of feet of water and left behind wave-cut terraces, beaches, and salt beds. Wind has stripped the surface bare in some places and piled up sand dunes in others. The result is a geological paradise.

What we see today is only the latest development in a region that contains many complex ingredients that have gone through countless processes. A little understanding about rocks and time helps make sense of Death Valley National Park's otherwise incomprehensible hodgepodge of geology.

PRECAMBRIAN TIME

Geologic time is divided into four major parts based mostly on the types of life that existed during each era. The fossil record indicates that life had somehow developed on Earth nearly 3.5 billion years ago, but from then through most of the next 3 billion years there was little change. Life existed entirely as single-celled forms such as archaea, bacteria, and cyanobacteria. These cells reproduce by simple cell division, and there is little evolution because the offspring is genetically identical to the parent. Colonies of bacteria sometimes caused mounded mineral accumulations called stromatolites to grow around them, but only rarely were the cells themselves preserved as fossils. Because of this lack of preserved cells, and also because rocks this old have almost always been recrystallized during later mountain-building episodes, very little is known about the first 4 billion years — 87 percent — of the Earth's history. All of this vast time span, from the creation of the entire Earth 4.7 billion years ago up to "only" 700 million years ago, is commonly lumped together as Precambrian Time.

Death Valley's Precambrian rocks are divided into three main sections. Oldest are high-grade metamorphic materials that make up much of the bedrock in Death Valley's mountain ranges. Little can be said about these rocks but, because of their original composition of sand and silt, we know they were deposited as sediment on a gentle floodplain about 1.8 billion years ago. Later they were severely metamorphosed during major mountain building. Those mountains were stripped away by erosion long before the end of the Precambrian. These rocks are exposed at the surface in relatively small areas. Two places where they can be easily seen are the cliffs above Badwater and along lower Wildrose Canyon below the campground.

Later, a series of sedimentary rocks known as the Pahrump Group was deposited. These formations — the Crystal Springs, Beck Spring, and Kingston Peak — were laid down mostly in a shallow marine environment. Later metamorphism affected them too, but it was less intense and the original sedimentary structures often remain visible. The most important aspect of these rocks is that sometime much later they were intruded by an igneous rock called diabase. Where it encountered the dolomite (calcium-magnesium carbonate) of the Crystal Springs Formation, large deposits of talc were formed.

Again, there was a hiatus before the deposition of sedimentary rocks resumed. These last Precambrian rocks are commonly assigned to the Vendian (or Ediacaran) Period, a time transitional to the Paleozoic Era. Trace fossils, such as burrows and feeding trails but not fossils of the animals that made them, are occasionally found in these rocks.

THE PALEOZOIC ERA

The abrupt appearance of complex multicellular life between about 700...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University Press of Colorado
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2015
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1607323400
• ISBN 13: 9781607323402
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Auflage: 3
• Anzahl der Seiten: 456
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar