Timbisha or Death Valley: As Dry as It Gets

 

Wherein Moominmama visits the red-light district of Rhyolite, makes a new friend and explores the driest desert in North America...

As Moominmama reaches the end of her tour of the Mohave desert, it's hard to imagine that Death Valley has been a place of human habitation for a long time. 

The Timbisha Shoshone people have been here for hundreds of years and continue to live here after fighting successfully for the right to a parcel within the national park near Furnace Creek.

There are roughly 30-35 Shoshone who live here, and they call this land Timbisha. It has been a land of life, not death, for them. Mesquite trees, which can run their roots deep into the soil to reach the underground aquifer, grow long green pods that will dry and provide a nutritious flour. In the mountains, there are piñon trees with delicious pine nuts (yum!)

Co-existence with the parks staff hasn't always been easy. My new friend Alissa, an archeologist who works for the park service here, said one of the Timbisha elders shared a story about a time when she had to stay behind in their home in the valley when the rest of the family went to the mountains. 

She was just a teenager, but parks service people, concerned that tourists were being exposed to native poverty, would destroy the Timbisha's adobe houses if they left them unoccupied. The park service used firehoses to raze the adobe. Happily, the relationship between the parks service and the Timbisha is much better now -- in no small part, I'm sure, thanks to Alissa's role as Cultural Resource Manager and liaison to the Timbisha. Much gratitude to Bonnie at the Koinonia church in Grand Junction for putting us in touch.

I asked Alissa if she was worried for her job and she said no, because the public outcry on behalf of national parks has been immense and bipartisan. At least the public-facing roles are likely to be protected, she said. It's her former colleagues at the Bureau of Land Management or the Forest Service she worried about because their jobs require balancing logging, mining or other commercial uses with the preservation of natural or cultural resources. They will be under more pressure from the current administration.

The Timbisha weren't the only people to make Death Valley their home. When gold, silver and copper were discovered here, the miners arrived. The town of Rhyolite boomed thanks to the discovery of gold. While there were some precious metals to be found here, borax would turn out to be the most successful product mined from Death Valley, formed from a combination of salt and boron-rich lavas from the volcanic eruptions.

When miners arrived, they started in tents but as communities grew, more permanent structures went up, creating boom towns throughout Death Valley. In Rhyolite, the town was on a rail line and had its own banks, a school to serve more than 200 children and a red-light district that registered more value on the tax rolls than the Porter Bro.'s general store. They formed a union and built a union hall.

The Adobe Dance Hall anchored the red-light district and was one of the first stone buildings to be erected. Only a portion of a single wall remains. The bank and office building pictured here in the respectable part of town came later. But one of the biggest ruins remaining is the public school. The town started with a wooden schoolhouse and a single teacher, but after her class size grew to 225 kids, she reportedly suffered a nervous breakdown! 

The town approved a bond and built a larger stone school just as the mines began to fail. People moved away; World War I began. The new school, a fancy new railroad station and other buildings that had gone up only a few years prior were all abandoned, even the town jail and courthouse.

As the mining potential faded, the wealthy owners of some of the borax mining claims in Death Valley promoted the area for tourists and built some of the first accommodations for them.

The unusual landscape attracting tourists to this day was created by plate tectonics millions of years ago when slabs of rock pulled apart and tipped upward, creating valleys in between. In the process, the peaks blocked the flow of moist air from the Pacific, drying out the region. Volcanic activity contributed to the colorful mineral mixes.

Once a large lake, Death Valley has dried steadily over time, leaving only salty "badwater" at its lowest point. The plates continue to move, and Badwater Basin, 282 feet below sea level, continues to subside. 

Ironically for such a dry place (it gets an average of less than 2 inches of rain per year), it's been shaped by water, especially flash floods, and you can see the evidence in the canyons. 

These vertical stripes were created by a long-ago waterfall that would have towered overhead. 

In Mosaic Canyon, a rocky conglomerate has been smoothed out by running water and sand, polishing pieces of pale dolomite now cemented together into a mosaic - thus the name. 

In other parts of the canyon, the dolomite looks like marble with colored veins and swirls. Then there is this unusual blue and copper section near a dry falls at the top of the trail. As with every place I've visited, the natural world tosses up surprises in unexpected places. 

On the downside, the extreme dryness makes this an extraordinarily dusty place. A couple days with gusty winds, and there's a film of silt over everything inside and out. Even after I leave, I'm sure I'll be discovering Death Valley in all kinds of gaps and corners!

Moominmama also got to experience a couple days of 100 degree heat, though it's cooler now. That required early morning hikes and afternoons spent seeking out air conditioning or cooler elevations!  The tradeoff, though, is a view like this at sunset from my campground: mesquite tree on the right and badlands in chocolate and cream ahead.