Finally back in Death Valley!  My DV trip will be a little different this year.  I'm traveling with a friend from Europe for a few months.  We spent a few weeks in DV circa 2017, so this year's DV trip is a mix of re-tread, nostalgia, and new adventures.  I'll avoid posting much in the way of re-treads of hikes that I've already posted or well visited popular areas. 

Anyway, let's get started!

This is actually a hike that I've been looking forward to for almost a year now, since I was out here in March 2024.  "SEE HERE" or SEE HERE.  This officially unnamed feature is visible from virtually any point on Badwater Rd and has always intrigued me.  Last year I set out to visit this geologic anomaly for the first time and to uncover a few of it's secrets.  What I found on those trips of course only whetted my appetite and left more questions than answers as always.  In the interim I was contacted by a professor of geology and we talked at length about the make-up of this feature.  It is down in the textbooks as “volcanic tuff”, as so determined by the great DV geologist Charlie Hunt (who's wife Alice also studied the area's indigenous history).  Much of this outcrop more resembles sandstone than volcanic tuff and there are strata within it that contain sedimentary layers from an ancient lakebed.  Perhaps the whole thing is somewhere in the middle, a tuffaceous sandstone with some lithic elements.  Interestingly there is also a much whiter layer of ash/tuff below all of this that makes up White Tanks Wash at the base of this geologic feature.  Someone with better geological credentials than me will have to break it all down for me someday. 

This year I wanted to dig a bit deeper on both the geological and archeological make up of what I am calling the Tephora Sphinx, due to it looking like a lounging cat from the south.  (Someday I will get a better photo with my telephoto...)


One of the first things I wanted to accomplish was to attempt to navigate the main canyon that splits the tuff essentially in two, if I could gain access.  Last year I had only navigated most of the way around the perimeter of the landform and not inside of it. 


Looking at the Tephora Sphinx from one of the many benches you have to scale on the hike in. 


A closer look at the canyon that I am calling Ash Crack Canyon. 


The first obstacle is getting into the enclosed bowl at the base of the canyon.  There was a bit of a tricky section to this climb on the most obvious way in, but there was also a very easy bypass on the left side. 


Looking in from the top of the bypass.  Oof… looks like a long rock scramble. 





Getting started.


Here is an exposed piece of the sedimentary layer poking through.


It was quite a rubble pile in places.


Looking back down canyon.


A very lovely section of narrows. 








I was immensely surprised to see this arch poking out of the cliff.  I generally wouldn't have thought that crumbly volcanic tuff would support an arch. 





Eventually we were turned back by this ~20ft dryfall. 


Looking back down canyon.  I think there was a viable route (albeit in garbage crumbly rock) on the right here that would have gotten you around the fall.  But with daylight fading, we wanted to try to navigate around the whole canyon from the above. 


Looking back one last time.


We headed up the very steep sides of the rounded tuff.  Which was quite grippy right up until it wasn't at all.  The nature of the surface goes from 80 grit sandpaper to ball bearings on plywood as soon as you get caught sight-seeing.


It was quite a maze-in-the-sky to navigate between the eroded canyons. 


Looking South towards our trucks and on to Shoreline Butte and eventually the Confidence Hills.


Looking towards DV proper.


Looking West into the Panamints. 





Looking South from the summit of Tephora Sphinx.


Looking North towards Starvation Canyon. 


At the head of the canyon.  We had wanted to try from this end and meet our track in the middle of the Ash Crack, but daylight was getting away from us. 


More of that lake bottom layer. 



Odd human-looking “print” in one of the sedimentary layer.  Suspiciously about 8-9” long as well.  Haha. 


Pushing our luck past sunset due to the fullness of the moon, the colors over the valley were phenomenal. 





Just as our moon-shadows started to become visible we received quite a fright as we entered the final wash of the hike back:  an angry burro huffing loudly at us from 25yrds away.  I could only see the white diamond on his face in the moonlight because the coward was hiding behind a huge boulder to yell at us.  After yelling back at him had no effect (but was a very cathartic way to bleed off the adrenaline), I also tried telling him that I had no interest in his burro harem, which also had absolutely no effect.  So we just yelled at each other for a while until I was far enough across the wash that he finally shut up.

That looks like a very cool place. Yes I can see the cat. Thanks for posting the great pix, quite enjoyable!

Love this unusual and out of the way hike. How many miles covered on this?

(2025-01-24, 07:45 PM)DeathValleyDazed Wrote: Love this unusual and out of the way hike. How many miles covered on this?

I’ve done 5 hikes out to this area so far.  I cover about 5-7mi on average depending on what I’m looking for or how much daylight I have.  

Elevation gain is more than you would think with Panamint wash crossings. Averaging about 1500ft of gain.

That's a really cool, fascinating area. Thanks for sharing!

I'm really glad that you're back in the park. I hope this is the first of many more awesome reports.

Looking good, sir .... you've got my cabin fever running on full blast.

Angry burro encounters are just about the only time I can remember almost pooping myself in the Park. Pretty sure it was Hanaupah Canyon I was hiking up years ago and unbeknownst to me there was an angry burro on a bush-covered rise right above me. The bastard screamed at me full-blast from maybe 25 feet away and for a second there I could feel my soul leave my body. Fsck!

I'm aiming to make a key modification to the truck this week you recommended and then hopefully I'll be down in the Park kicking rocks come March. Keep up the adventures!

Balll joint upgrade? 😁

No, that would have been the obvious / smart move. Replaced the lower control arms and tie rods last month, but OEM ball joints looked fine for now. Going to try to run the truck a bit more this year and then reevaluate this autumn to see what my next steps should be.

Maybe you didn't recommend it actually, but I'm about to replace the alternator with a higher capacity model (from a Suzuki Grand Vitara, LoL) and all the cables.

Ah yes. I did recommend that. I used a Cadillac alternator on my Taco. The stock one barely runs the headlights & done light at the same time. Lol

This hike was to a landmark that I have been staring at off of North Rd in Death Valley for years.  It sits sort of behind the Grapevine Ranger's Station (now with Starlink and open bathrooms!) and is fairly accessible from Mesquite Spring Campground (now a whopping $20/night). 

Due to there being a smattering of Native American stuff in the general area, I was hopeful of finding something either on the route or at the destination.  Alas, other than some trails, I struck out on that front.  But it was still an amazing hike to a place that has likely not seen any visitors since the prospecting rush about 125 years ago. 

Looking at this oddity from the Ranger's Station.  I'm calling it the Island of Misfit Gnomes (playing off of the more famous “Gnome's Workshop” on the DV salt flats, the rest will become apparent in due course).


First view of IoMG several miles into the hike.  There are several of these large benches to cover on the way there. 


A reasonable portion of the way we got to follow these old Native American trails.  I'm calling them originally indigenous trails because, while I'm sure prospectors utilized them during the mining boom, there remains just enough evidence of prior use before that as well like scattered hunting blinds & deadfall traps. 


The first of many prospector's cairns that we would see today.  The prospectors this area built them absolutely enormous!  Some were 4-5ft tall.  Definitely among the biggest I've seen in DV.  (Prospectors built cairns to denote ridges or peaks that they had already searched for potential mineral deposits.)


The narrow ridge that just barely connects the bench to this odd feature.


A good look up the huge wash that separates Tin Mountain from the enormous ridge btw Ubehebe Crater and the terminus of the Cottonwoods.


There are at least 5 prospector's cairns in this photo.  They didn't skimp.





An absolutely massive one on the Island.  Over 5ft tall.


So, by a wild coincidence and out of my own ignorance rather than by design, this cool Island of Misfit Gnomes just happens to be another chunk of volcanic tuff found along the west edges of Death Valley itself.  I had not predicted that coming off of my explorations of the similarly volcanic tuff-based Temphora Sphinx 80 miles South in the Panamints.  But there's no denying it!

A hatchery of Misfit Gnomes. 


A good portion of this island in the sky is covered in these tiny, gnome-sized hoodoos of volcanic tuff, averaging about 6-12” tall.  Just thousands of them. 


And some of the hoodoos are in very fantastical shapes like this cow-dragon thing. 


Interestingly, there is also a very obvious sedimentary layer under/in the tuff from an ancient lakebed, just like over in the Panamints. 


Which include some very clear traces of the lake bottom frozen in time. 



A few smaller caves are scattered throughout but are mostly collapsed. 









Looking South down Death Valley. 








Seriously, there's a LOT of these little guys. 


Looking North along the ridge that ends in Ubehebe Crater.  I hiked that last year and was amazed to find that it's covered in rounded river rocks.  Scotty's Ranch is on the right in the distance.


Looking towards Grapevine Canyon.  It would have been wild to watch the flash flood that took out Scotty's Castle come down this wash carrying all the associated flotsam. 


Another massive cairn.  This one about 4.5ft tall and almost 3ft across. 





A few bits of what I call 'iron-wood' were scattered around.  It's some kind of petrified wood (that I haven't had the time to research properly) similar to some of the stuff I found near Davis Gulch in Utah. 


I found myself never really getting sick of the endless whimsy of these constant hoodoos. 





Finally back home, where I parked it, I whipped up a killer Spanish Tortilla to replace some of those lost calories. 


Overall a very interesting hike that turned out completely differently than I expected.  And another interesting note on the geology of Death Valley, one that has only added to my questions and curiosity.