PART 3 of 3: Some views from near Death Valley.
We have spent many picture pages following the Amargosa River this Spring, as well as several years ago. We looked real hard at the place where the Amargosa River comes out of Amargosa Valley, beside Eagle Mountain, for example, and now we see it from the air:
Eagle Mountain and Franklin Lake Playa in front of it are clearly visible. The swath of white that is evidence for water flow and evaporation. The main feed is the Carson Slough. The little finger that goes away from the playa (to the right in our photo) is where the Amargosa River feeds in. It is a much lesser feed than the Carson Slough, but that smaller, but longer, feed's name is attached to the river that drains both.
In the right foreground of the above picture lies the Ash Meadows area also previously featured on this site (see, for example, last year's Devils Hole Workshop picture pages)
Here is a better view, with the edge of Crystal Reservoir visible (look for blue water). Crystal Reservoir was pictured in the sites linked above, as well as this one:
The Amargosa River's path farther south, past Shoshone, California, ought to be in this photo taken from the northbound flight the week before:
Shoshone is right where the first '05' is in the date stamp. Death Valley's southern reach is in the distance (several mountains away, the light-colored sandy area).
Continuing south (in this photo series that is, obviously I was flying in the opposite direction): the Amargosa River south of Shoshone disappears from view just before entering the Amargosa Canyon (explored last year), and reappears at the top of the photo as it now flows in the opposite direction into Death Valley:
Finally: where the Amargosa River makes its westward and then northward turns to enter Death Valley from the south. You can see the trace of the river here as it goes through the Amargosa Canyon.
The canyon is in the mass of light and dark areas in the lower center of the picture. You can see the river's dark trace as it enters this area from the right, and pick it up again as a light colored trace flowing directly west (for a little while) out of this area. It passes the Dumont Dunes, and then makes its final, slow right turn that will have it flowing north into Death Valley as already shown above. The dark volcanic hills sitting in the light-colored dunes are the Spring Hills. We have seen this place several times from ground level (here most recently):
The southbound flight took a somewhat different course, and after Ash Meadows I saw the Pahrump fault-fed area of vegetation and water in the valley just west of the Pahrump Valley, Stewart Valley. This we have also seen from ground level (click to go there):
Pahrump's roads are visible to the left in the above photo, and here is Pahrump's dry lake:
Since Pahrump is rapidly becoming a large bedroom community for Las Vegas, it should be no surprise when the next photo shows the pass through which Pahrump-Las Vegas traffic flows, with Mount Potosi in the background with just a touch of snow remaining. The dry lake in the background is part of Sandy Valley (and no doubt is in part what gave the valley its name):
Of course the nice thing about this route is that a few seconds later one can see the Keystone thrust fault (look at the rock contrast just above the date stamp in the next photo). This horizontal fault is where ~600-million-year-old limestones have been shoved over the existing 200-million-year-old sandstones by the pressure created as part of the Sevier and Laramide orogenies (click to go to a discussion of these mountain-building events). Tremendous eastward pressure broke off huge chunks of rock, sometimes sixty miles wide and several deep, and shoved them to the east over anything that was already there:
So the last photo in this series is another view of the Las Vegas Valley's Red Rock area, featured before on this web site (click to go there):
go back to the Sierra Nevada and some interesting clouds
go back to death Valley from the air
Go home to ThoughtsandPlaces.Org page
you are here now: The third and last page looking at some of the environment around Death Valley that we have explored by car earlier this year.