Death Valley Deep Dive 2024

[Beardilocks]

The next morning I headed back up Johnson Canyon to take another crack at the Sandstone Dome that overlooks what I've found is called White Tanks Wash, between Johnson & Starvation Canyons. 

Alice Hunt's archeological papers from the 1950 mentioned several Native American “campsites” in the area (a loose category that is not elaborated on) and, having found one that I don't think she had found on my last trip out here, thought I'd see what else I could find.  All the tinajas (natural potholes that hold water) would mean that it must have been a great stopping point for many travelers over the millennia.  Plus, I have never seen any trip reports or heard any tales of this fantastic feature that can be seen from all over the valley, and thought that the area needed further exploration.  Let me be clear:  I'm not “discovering” anything out here or “pioneering” any routes.  Just exploring an area that sees criminally (or delightfully!) few visitors.  Haha. 

But first: Tragedy. 


Somewhere in the first mile or so of Johnson Canyon Rd I DESTROYED a tire.  I still can't quite believe it.  Tires were set @ 20psi for rough road touring and I was in 1st gear puttering along at about 12mph on a freshly graded road.


But I somehow still managed to get a 3in long gash in my sidewall.  It happened so fast I heard my rim hit the gravel.  The only thing I could find walking back down the road was a rock that the bulldozer had shattered into several knife blades.  So there's a fun new danger to watch out for out here.  Not that you can see them from the cockpit. 

After a tire change that would definitely get me fired from Nascar, I continued up the road and set out on my hike despite the rain/snow I could see hanging to the Panamints nearby and occasionally peppering me with drops.  I wondered how the kids trying to summit the cloud and snow wrapped Telescope Peak were fairing. 

White Tanks Wash definitely lives up it's name on the East side of the Dome. 




It is a wild place to hike because it feels more like Utah than Death Valley.  Until you turn around and see the salt pan glittering behind you. 


I spotted a nice cave to check out.


It turned out to be quite spacious.  I couldn't tell if ALL the black residue was packrat feces or if some of it was soot from fires.  I quickly decided that a taste test was out of the question. 


Great view though.  I would be finding out shortly if I could get up into those bowls/hidden grottos up there. 




There are quite a number of white-ish pink slots and dryfalls, all with very full tinajas this year.  I probably could have made it up this one, but one slip meant wet (and stinky) boots/pants in the funky tanks.


The bypass was sketchy but went through.  The decomposing sandstone was mostly covered in chunky marbles of itself.  Not round but round-ish with sharpish corners.  Which meant it had some grip in thin layers but was ball-bearings-on-glass in thicker layers.  I ended up on my ass easily over 20x.  Which was fine with me as long as I didn't slide off a cliff or dryfall.  A few of tumble/slides were 10-20ft down the face.








Oddly shaped rock.  Looks vaguely familiar….


So incredibly un-DV looking.  That white slot canyon was next destination. 


Such a cool canyon.  And one I wouldn't be going straight up.  The bypass is STEEP but the footing was good. 


This cave on the other side of the canyon caught my eye.  Mainly because the flat rock on the right would have had to been brought there.  All the other rock in the immediate vicinity is the decomposing sandstone and not in slab form.  Possibly a mortero again. 


Finally at the top!  And on the cusp of a passage further into the Dome if I could get over the larger white bathtub of a dryfall...


There's the salt pan of Death Valley, but the sandstone cliffs made it a very odd spectacle indeed. 


The Ivory Bathtub.





I couldn't get over the strange view. 


I found a safe (ish) way around the Bathtub and found that a white slot that continued at a 90deg angle to the previous falls. 


A double slot actually going in both directions. 


I think with two people I could have gotten over the dryfall in the left slot and gotten up ito the grotto.  But alone it was a bit much for me.  Next time...


View from the top of the Bathtub. 


Some very interesting sedimentary layers in the area. 


I decided to follow the cliff edge as far as I could.  With the possibility of getting cliffed-out and having to backtrack for miles very clear in my mind. 


More caves/alcoves/overhangs that were potentially utilized in the past.  This one was full of fresh sheep scat and what looked suspiscously like mountain lion scat.  Luckily the later was much older. 


I eventually made it to the largest grotto, the one I had been hoping to get into since my first hike out here. 


It's killer.  And extremely lush right now.  Walking on loose boulders covered to invisibility by thick greenery is a new challenge in Death Valley. 


 


I had to check out this odd feature.


I can't tell if this is like foam bubble residue or insect related.


This looks deliberately placed.  More on these types of features at the end of this post….


Eventually I made my way out of the sandstone maze with several more falls and a few extremely sketchy downclimbs on decomposing granite faces.  This place is certainly not boring!

On the way out, down by the spring that I showed on my visit here (where there was a lot of destroyed barbed wire fencing around it), I found someone's collection of oddities on a shelf.  A horseshoe and a cool rock among other things. 


I had been booking it on the way out as the wind was picking up and the snow/rain was starting to descend off the mountain and chase me to my truck finally, as it had been threatening all day. 


I'm tacking these photos to the end of the post to disguise the location that I found them at.  Yeah, it just looks like a stick.  But I think it's my favorite “find” out here in many years.  Alice Hunt describes several previously inhabited caves in Death Valley having this feature on a back wall, but (to my memory) she didn't speculate as to purpose.  (I could be wrong but I don't have time at the moment to re-read her dense several hundred page report).  But Meighan stated in his paper on the Coville Rock Shelter (which details the excavations of nearly a hundred previously occupied caves near the Racetrack Valley) that a stick wedged into the back of a cave was meant as something of a ward or a blessing of the habitation site.  It was imbued with a kind of magic or spirit that would protect the dwelling or the items/people in it in some fashion.  It's a subject that I definitely need to do more research on now. 


This one is very obviously not only wedged into the back wall but also held in place by several stones that were used to make sure it was wedged tightly.  There is no way of knowing whether it's been for a hundred years or several thousand years.  As unassuming as it looks, it is the only item of spiritual or religious significance that I have ever come across in the wild like this.  Something that a human soul imbued with a type of magic and that a human hand placed in the same spot that it still sits today, likely thousands of years later.  Without a doubt the coolest stick I've ever found.