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History & Old Trails
We arrived at Laws Railroad Museum Tuesday morning for our appointment with Jessi, an archivist with the museum. Jessi would help us find articles we were after in the Inyo Register newspaper from the very early 1900’s.
Information gleaned from our research ignited our desire to get back to Death Valley National Park. We reserved a backcountry campsite along Hole in the Wall Road for four nights as this was a convenient location for what we had planned. We’ve overnighted so many times at Hole in the Wall, we know it well and long before designated sites and permits were required. With the horrors of uncontrolled use we’ve seen firsthand, we support the new system. Before setting up in Hole in the Wall, we drove up Echo Canyon to look at the designated sites there for possible future use. We made a stop at the Inyo Mine.
We made our usual rounds up on the bajada after setting up in our campsite at Hole in the Wall and took in the day’s fading light. The Panamint Range, to the west, was shrouded in clouds.
Fossils in limestone
And Golden Suncups (Chylismia brevipes)
With the desire for a day off from driving, the next day we revisited an old favorite of ours, Slit Canyon.
After passing through the Hole in the Wall, we climbed the system of washes and entered the mouth of Silt Canyon.
We took a look at the series of pour overs and the grotto that block passage in the narrowing canyon.
We did well climbing and bypassing but stopped at the climb up and into the grotto.
We backtracked and climbed the high bypass over these obstacles.
Dropping back into the canyon, we entered the namesake slit, the highlight of this canyon.
The slit ends at a 15 foot polished pour over.
It can be climbed on the right side and we’ve climbed it three or four times in the past. Today the Lady did not feel comfortable making the climb. It had been awhile since we’d been on the smooth rock of Death Valley canyon pour overs. She was still shaky from a touch of intestinal issues the day before. We were happy with the decision and turned back to enjoy the journey back down canyon.
And then back over the high bypass.
Coming back out of Slit Canyon, we passed the boulder jammed mouth of Undertaker Canyon.
We’ve tried three times to figure the route up through the massive boulder jam without success. To finish off our hike we decided to circle around the south side of the “wall” and return to camp from the south.
Looking back north along the wall as we hiked south. The gap - the Hole in the Hall - is at the end of the shadow in the upper left.
Notch-leaf Phacelia (Phacelia crenulata)
This was just the start of wildflowers we would encounter this trip in Death Valley.
Digonnet describes the wall this way -
“The wall itself, 300 to 400 feet high, is a narrow barrier of rock about 2.5 miles long that bisects an alluvial fan of the Funeral Mountains. It is made of uplifted beds of sandstone and conglomerate from the Funeral Creek Formation, pockmarked with numerous cavities. The beds are folded along a major syncline arching steeply to the southwest underneath Furnace Creek Wash and resurfacing on the far side around Zabriskie Point.”
Rounding the south end of the wall we came upon an old track running across the bajada to the Red Amphitheater.
The massive wash from the Red Amphitheater took us around the south end of the wall.
We climbed up on the bajada along the west side of the wall and worked our way back to Hole in the Wall wash and our campsite. Notice how green the desert is after this season’s storms.
Hole in the Wall
In the late afternoon we explored up a side canyon that we named “Confusion Canyon” because the geology did just that.
That is the wall in the upper left background.
A look over the eroded walls of the lower canyon at Hole in the Wall.
The softer sandstone is undercut by water here.
The walls narrowed and some layers of sandstone had fossil ripples from flowing water.
This is where the geology became confusing. The sandstone appeared to be layers of water deposited sediments.
But why were the layers distorted?
There were puzzling layers.
And layers of much harder material.
The distortions, I thought, were associated with faults and cracks through the formation…….
…..until I saw this layering.
The layers of sandstone were capped with a harder layer of conglomerate.
We came upon layers of harder lighter colored rock.
And then a complete surprise, a thick layer of conglomerate in the layers.
We remain confused but what an interesting journey through a story told in rocks. We hiked all the way to the end of Confusion Canyon and then turned and returned back down through these mysteries.
The next morning we were up early and set out for one of the main events of this return trip of ours to Death Valley.
Our adventure continues in the upcoming Part Two.
