Titus Canyon: We Make Our Way Toward Klare Spring

We're making our way down Titus Canyon toward Klare Spring, an obligatory petroglyph stop about two miles below Leadfield. On this rather short leg of our journey, we'll be seeing a hodgepodge of photos from two trips taken in two separate years, all shot within a short distance of each other not far upstream from the spring. The canyon distance of the views that our photos will show, upstream to downstream, will be about two miles (3.2 km).

Our first photo set looks back to the east. You do remember that last time, before we stopped for our little hike scramble, we had looked to the south and had seen what I think is the main strand of the Titus Canyon fault zone. We can see this same fault exposure from our current stopping point just north of a shadowy cliff. The mile-distant fault is placing Bonanza King Formation dolomite (Єb) of the upper plate over Carrara Formation (Єc) limestone and a bit of Zabriskie Quartzite of the lower plate (we can't see the Zabriskie from this angle). I’ve sketched the main strand of the Titus Canyon fault zone (TCFZ) in hachured dark blue.

As explained previously, that fault appears to wrap around to become what I've drawn in as the same fault strand, high on the cliffs in the upper right. I've postulated a lower strand, drawn in hachured bright blue. The exact position of the proposed fault is questionable, possibly higher on the hill than I've shown it, as is the formation contained within in the resulting "middle plate," which I've shown as Bonanza King. In this first photo, taken in late February of this year, things look pretty brown, because spring has just barely arrived.

The cliffs on the side of the road are captivating in that they look iron stained and possibly brecciated. I think they make a great backdrop to a photo that's very similar to the first one, but which was taken on a green spring day in early May, 2009. The creosote was in bloom, and so were some cacti and other wildflowers.

I'm not sure what rock formation is exposed in this almost-always shadowed cliff. It might be Carrara, as labeled, or it might be Bonanza King.

MOH and I wandered around this area quite a bit, checking out the wildflowers.

Here we are, a little to the north of the last spot, along an old wash channel paralleling the road, still looking to the east. 

The same photo with geologic labeling by moi.
(H/t to Dana Hunter for the "moi.")

What are we seeing here? Well, we're looking at the main strand of the TCFZ on the cliff in the distance to the east, as before, but here I've postulated an offsetting high-angle normal fault, down-to-the-north, and drawn it in with lighter blue. As for the cliffy areas north and south of the wash and road (left and right, respectively), I'm unsure of the exact location of the Titus Canyon fault. On the left, there is definite Єc in the lower cliffs, some unknown in a slope and cliffy area above that (labeled Єc?), and definite Єb near the top of the cliff (unlabeled! who let that slip by?).

Looking back to the first photo set, there’s a huge alluvial fan coming off the higher cliffs south of the road. On our most recent trip through the canyon in early 2016, I became fascinated by the massive alluvial fans within this part of the Grapevine Mountains. It looked like one hell of a lot of erosion to me—and probably all taking place fairly rapidly and fairly recently when the Grapevine Mountains were uplifted radically in the late late Cenozoic—and so I took a number of photos of fans, some that looked active, like this one, and others that looked older.

A steep side canyon area south of the road has filled with coarse alluvial debris, forming an alluvial fan complex.

A closer view of part of the alluvial fan.

A Google Earth image of the fan complex. North is not up! The magenta line on the right is the main strand of the TCFZ (extrapolated); the magenta line on the left is possibly the lower strand in this area.

Then I looked off to the northwest and took this photo after spotting the reddish alluvial fan remnant seemingly stranded high on the active fan slopes:

A reddish color in alluvium is often indicative of an older age. Rocks above the fan are all Bonanza King Formation.

I have a hard time comprehending the amount of uplift required, possibly in pulses, to create the alluvial record that can be seen within and on the edge of the mountains in the Death Valley area.

Google Earth image of our second fan complex; magenta lines are related to my idea(s) of the TCFZ.

A little bit of alluvial air-photo mapping.

The current wash (above) is obvious. What I've labeled as 'terrace 1' can be seen in the last photo as the alluvium in front of the alluvial ledge in the lower part of the photo, the alluvium I was standing on when I took that photo. Beyond that, we have the larger fan complex, including the reddish fan in the photo, which I've labeled. I couldn’t decide where to mark the lower boundaries of that reddish fan. Anyone up for some mapping?

I then turned to the west, zooming in to see what I thought might be some reddish talus, possibly small alluvial fans, high on the slope.

Reddish talus high on the slope below dark gray and reddish outcrops of the Bonanza King Formation.

It turns out that this photo shows two mapped strands of the TCFZ, although the exact location of both is somewhat in question.

Here is my best guess of the geology, taken from Niemi (2012) and Google Earth air-photo interpretation.

The mapped upper strand of the TCFZ has placed younger Bonanza King Formation rocks (Єb) over older Carrara Formation (Єc), with the Єc forming what is here a middle plate, while the mapped lower strand has placed the Carrara over the even older Wood Canyon Formation (ZЄw).

Meanwhile, back on the lower slopes:

Bloomin’ cactus!

The barrels are leaning strongly to the south. They grow faster on the shady side, causing them to lean over, giving them the nickname “compass cactus.”

These leafy green plants were everywhere.

Barrel cactus, yellow wildflowers, and ephedra (the olive green plant behind the barrel clump).

Here’s another view of the same plants, with dolomite of the Bonanza King Formation as a backdrop. The ledge on the left might be the location of the upper strand of the TCFZ, just above Klare Spring.

And that puts us in a good position to move on to Klare Spring.

Location map

Related Posts:
The Approach to Titus Canyon: Tan Mountain
The Approach to Titus Canyon: Up and over White Pass
The Approach to Titus Canyon: To Red Pass
The Approach to Titus Canyon: Just Below Red Pass
A Hike at Red Pass, Titus Canyon Road, Death Valley, CA
Titus Canyon Road: A Little History and a Few Maps
Down into Titus Canyon: We Leave Red Pass Behind (Finally!)
Scribbles
Titus Canyon: The Upper Part of Lost Canyon
Leadfield: Scams with a Side of Geology
Leadfield: Views from Old Mine Buildings
Leadfield: Geology...and a Cactus...on the Way Back to the Parking Area
Almost Titus Canyon: Is This a Fold? And... Apparent Dip with Post-it® Notes
Titus Canyon: The TCFZ, the FCFZ, and a few Other Faults
Titus Canyon: Another Look at the Titus Canyon Fault and A Scramble

From the Road: Whipple Mountains

Savahia Peak in the Whipple Mountains, with cholla.

And here's a cartoon of the geology.

The upper plate volcanic rocks are dipping moderately to steeply to the west (cyan bedding). The Whipple Mountains detachment fault (hachured dark blue) is fairly flat-lying in this area, separating reddish, hematitic upper plate rocks from greenish, lower plate chloritic and mylonitic gneisses. I've drawn in a few approximately located listric normal faults in bright blue to illustrate the general structural configuration. The upper plate has moved to the east relative to the lower plate, as indicated by both the dip of beds in the upper plate, and (especially) by the movement on upper plate listric normal faults.

Leadfield: Geology...and a Cactus...on the Way Back to the Parking Area

We've left the far northwest mine building at Leadfield, have sauntered past a large chunk of Tertiary megabreccia (Mbx), and we're making our way back to the parking area by the Leadfield sign.

Looking to the SW, we see part of the broad fold in the Bonanza King Formation juxtaposed against the foreground mass of Mbx.

Wonderful barrel cacti grow right along the trail.

The barrel cactus here is of the genera Ferocactus, possibly the type known as California barrel cactus, or Ferocactus cylindraceus (there is more than one subspecies of F. cylindraceus).

From this same location, we also have the opportunity to see one of the area's several low-angle faults known collectively as the Titus Canyon fault zone (TCFZ). Here's one online version of the TCFZ in map view and cross section. On the map it's shown as a thick, hatched line wrapping around the upland south of Titus Canyon. It crosses the canyon at Klare Spring, and northward becomes the main strand of the Fall Canyon fault zone (FCFZ). I modified the figures by moving the scales, credits, and index map for cropping and added the location of Leadfield to the map. Note the askew north-south line indicated by the 117°00' mark; the long dashed line on the right is the skewed CA-NV border.

Source: Part of Fig. 1 of Reynolds, 1974 reprinted in Troxel and Wright, 1976 at NPS History eLibrary.

Source: Part of Fig. 3 of Reynolds, 1974 reprinted in Troxel and Wright, 1976 at NPS History eLibrary.

Back on the trail, we're looking south toward the low hills.

My labeled version of this photo shows both thrust (thick line with sawteeth) and low-angle normal (thick line with hatch marks) symbols. Reynolds' map (the one in Lengner and Troxel, 2008), shows this fault with a thrust symbol, but it hooks up with one that appears on Google Earth to wrap around the terrain to become part of the larger Titus Canyon Fault system, even though that part of the low-angle fault system doesn't appear on Reynolds' summary map (above) or this composite map (Workman et al, 2002). You can also see this low-angle fault on my marked-up Google Earth image (below); I've got it there with two colors, deep blue and a kind of dark magenta. I should probably just change it all to one color, but when I made the image, I was trying to correlate different strands of the fault system, which I've since determined is a rather futile project without some field mapping and perhaps a bit of surveying, neither of which I'm likely to do!

The low-angle fault south of Leadfield places younger rocks on older rocks, a hallmark of low-angle normal faults; thrust faults (low-angle reverse faults) can also do that, but they more commonly produce an older-over-younger scenario.

Photo with geology from Reynolds (1969, in Lengner and Troxel, 2008).

Although seen here mostly in fault contact, the usual section from bottom up is Cambrian Zabriskie Formation (Cz), Cambrian Carrara Formation (Cc), and Cambrian Bonanza King Formation (Cb). The Eocene-Oligocene Titus Canyon Formation (EOgtc) and batches of megabreccia within the lower part of the EOgtc (Mbx) sit entirely in fault contact with the Cambrian rocks along a normal, down-to-the northeast fault. Landsliding or slumping along this fault or the TCFZ might be what produced the breccia bodies now known as Mbx.

My (current) Google Earth version of the geology at Leadfield.

The geology I've drawn onto Google Earth (GE) is mostly from two maps: North and northeast of the Titus Canyon road, the geology is largely from Niemi (2012); south and southwest of the road, the geology is largely from a map in Lengner and Troxel (2008), which they took from Reynolds (1969). The contacts as transferred to GE should be considered approximate; I've modified them where I've seen fit and added possible faults and a few other things like marker beds.

Let's keep meandering back toward the parking area.

Dried wildflowers, probably from the spring or summer of 2015, grow out of a concrete foundation.

Lengner and Troxel list this former building as "Frame and Iron Compressor and Engine Room," located on Western Lead Mines Company's March Storm claim No. 2. I'd usually just call something like this an old mill foundation.

I paused below the main mine dump, next to the larger metal building that we saw last time, to take two zoomed shots looking eastward across the valley of lower Lost Canyon.

Interesting fracture pattern in greenish brown rocks above the red slope formers of the Titus Canyon Formation. Is that tilted columnar jointing? Tilted bedding? Stay tuned.

Reddish bluff (earlier called "Tc Hill") above orange, brown, red, and greenish layers. All the formations are dipping to the north.

When I took the photos, I wasn't thinking of making a panorama, but look! They splice together fairly well with just a tiny bit missing in the middle. All the better to see the geology with.

We look eastward, over the parking area near the Leadfield sign.

With some geology added!

Here we're seeing most of the Tertiary section (Paleogene to Neogene).

The Tertiary section (from Niemi, 2012):
Tm = Miocene Timber Mountain Group (ash-flow tuff)
Tp = Miocene Paintbrush Gp (ash-flow tuff)
Tc = Miocene Crater Flat Gp (ash-flow tuff)
Tw = Miocene Wahguyhe Fm (sedimentary and volcanic rock)
Tg = Miocene Panuga Fm (conglomerate, sandstone, and minor tuff)
EOgtc = Eocene-Oligocene Titus Canyon Fm (various sedimentary facies)

Part of the pre-Tertiary section:
Єb = Bonanza King Formation (mostly dolostone with lesser limestone)
Єc = Carrara Formation (mostly siltstone, also quartzite and limestone)
Єz = Zabriskie Quartzite (thick-bedded to massive quartzite)
ZЄw = Wood Canyon Formation (a miscellaneous formation bounded by two quartzites, consisting of siltstone, quartzite, dolostone, conglomerate, and limestone)

The section is sliced by two major, roughly north-south trending normal faults, part of the Fall Canyon Fault Zone (FCFZ). I've labelled these FCFZ/W (westerly strand) and FCFZ/E (easterly strand), not to imply that these are the only strands of this fault zone. The faults are moderate- to high-angle at the surface, flattening at depth. There is a bit of white rock along the westerly strand of the FCFZ; I'm not sure if this is a fault breccia or shatter zone along the fault or some light-colored bed (tuff?) smeared along the fault, and I'm not sure if it belongs in the hangingwall or footwall. I decided to show it as a possible shatter zone, marked in dashed blue lines.

The fault shown with an up arrow to its right, is a somewhat minor high-angle normal fault with its down side toward us (down-to-the-west); it is not a reverse fault. (I'm afraid the arrow makes it look that way, but I don't feel like redoing the labeling!)

Same photo with a little more labeling.

In the second geological panorama, I've added a few broad orange, pink, and lavender lines or strokes to indicate three marker beds in the Panuga Formation (Tg). These are possibly tuffs. In the geologic image below, the pink and lavender color of the upper two marker beds is reversed (my fault!).

Google Earth image of the same panorama.

The geologic map on Google Earth (same as earlier).

Next time, we'll finally get into the main branch of Titus Canyon!

A Few References:
Lengner, K., and Troxel, B.W., 2008, Death Valley's Titus Canyon & Leadfield ghost town: Deep Enough Press, 175 p.

Niemi, N.A., 2012, Geologic Map of the Central Grapevine Mountains, Inyo County, California, and Esmeralda and Nye Counties, Nevada: Nevada, Geological Society of America Digital Maps and Charts Series, DMC12, 1:48,000, 28 p. text.

Reynolds, M.W., 1969, Stratigraphy and structural geology of the Titus andTitanothere canyons area, Death Valley, California [Ph.D. thesis; not available online]: Berkeley, University of California, 310 p.

Reynolds, M.W., 1974, Geology of the Grapevine Mountains, Death Valley,California; a summary, in Death Valley region, California and Nevada, Geological Society of America Cordilleran Section, Field Trip 1 Guidebook: Death Valley Publishing Company, Shoshone, California, p. 91–97.

Workman, J.B., Menges, C.M., Page, W.R., Taylor, E.M., Ekren, E. B., Rowley, P.D., Dixon, G.L., Thompson, RRA., and Wright, L.A., 2002, Geologic map of the Death Valley ground-water model area, Nevada and California: U.S. Geological Survey Miscellaneous Field Studies Map MF-2381-A, Pamphlet text, Sheet 1, Sheet 2.

Location map

Related Posts:
The Approach to Titus Canyon: Tan Mountain
The Approach to Titus Canyon: Up and over White Pass
The Approach to Titus Canyon: To Red Pass
The Approach to Titus Canyon: Just Below Red Pass
A Hike at Red Pass, Titus Canyon Road, Death Valley, CA
Titus Canyon Road: A Little History and a Few Maps
Down into Titus Canyon: We Leave Red Pass Behind (Finally!)
Scribbles
Titus Canyon: The Upper Part of Lost Canyon
Leadfield: Scams with a Side of Geology
Leadfield: Views from Old Mine Buildings

The Approach to Titus Canyon: Tan Mountain

On our ongoing journey into Death Valley via Titus Canyon, we've left behind the Original Bullfrog mine (which can be seen from the road if you know where to look) and have made it past the eastern boundary of Death Valley National Park. As I've already mentioned, the Titus Canyon road can be distractingly washboardy in its early parts, and it's often barely wide enough for two vehicles to squeeze past each other, which only happens when a faster one wants to pass a slower one (it’s all one-way to the west).

Loose gravel typical of the Titus Canyon road east of Tan Mountain.

In the photo, we're looking back the way we just came, which happens to be northward here, toward some low volcanic hills in the northwesternmost part of the Amargosa Desert.

By the way, I took all the photos in this post in early May, 2009. A lot of flowers were blooming in the upper Amargosa Desert and along the Titus Canyon road. We stopped often on that trip, for flowers, lizards, and short hikes. We didn’t stop as often during our February trip to Death Valley: We were intent on getting to the lower elevations to see the superbloom.

Prickly pear cactus, which we saw along the road before entering the park (see location map way below). The cross-hatching pattern of the pads reminds me of the mineral alunite.

A close-up of the same plant.

An unidentified flowering plant with 1996 dime on the left for scale.

After about 50 minutes on the road, and about a half hour into the park (including flower-photo stops), MOH and I pulled over at a hill composed of exposed and outcropping ash-flow tuff. I found out later that this hill or butte is locally or colloquially known as “Tan Mountain.” It’s referred to by this name on Panoramio and in Death Valley's Titus Canyon & Leadfield Ghost Town by Lengner and Troxel (2002, 2008). The reason for the name is ... you guessed it, the color. It is not named on topo maps, and ordinarily, without knowing a local name, I'd call it hill 4915, for the 4915-foot marking shown on the Daylight Pass 7.5' quad (USGS TNM 2.0 location).

The road is widened somewhat at Tan Mountain, so it's easy to stop, look around, and go for a stroll. It can seem kind of warm on the slopes, even before ten in the morning; maybe the light-colored tuff reflects a lot of heat.

Tan Mountain, with geo-type hiker for scale.

We continued to take flower photos as we rambled upward.

An unknown yellow flowering plant with dime for scale.

Bright red fireweed on the slopes below the rounded spires and hoodoos of Tan Mountain.

Nearing the base of the cliffs, I stopped to take this photo of an outcrop of the pumiceous, lithic-rich, poorly welded ash-flow tuff that makes up Tan Mountain. I didn't climb to the top of the hill, so I didn't get to see if the degree of welding changed significantly in the 200 feet or so to the top.

A reddish brown lithic fragment in the poorly welded tuff.

Tent-like and hoodoo-like forms eroded into the ash-flow tuff.

I'm not sure what ash-flow tuff formation this is. It was mapped as Tr--Pliocene to Oligocene felsic lava flows and tuffs by Workman et al (2002), and Lengner and Troxel (2008) implied that it erupted from the Timber Mountain caldera, although maybe they were intending, on page 63, to refer to tuff sheets seen a little farther to the west when they said:

"...you will see volcanic debris only from the Timber Mountain caldera on this trip."

And that's how far we're going down the Titus Canyon road today.

Location map

Related Posts (in order of posting):
Death Valley, "Super" Blooms, Turtlebacks, and Detachments
Death Valley Trip, Part 2: More of the Badwater Turtleback Fault
Death Valley Trip, Part 3: Northward, and over Daylight Pass
Death Valley Trip, Getting There: Wave Clouds beyond the Sierra
Death Valley Trip, Getting There: A Hike to Pleistocene Shorelines

Death Valley Trip, Getting There: Walker Lake, Road Stories, A Bit about Copper, and Some Folds near Luning

Death Valley Trip, Getting There: A Jeep Trail, Folds and Cartoons of Folds, Even More Folds, and Boundary Peak

Death Valley Trip, Getting There: Highway 95, Redlich, Columbus Salt Marsh, and Another View of Boundary Peak

Death Valley Trip, Getting There: Coaldale, Black Rock, Lone Mountain, and the Boss Mine

Death Valley Trip, Getting There: Black Rock to Lida Junction to Beatty

Beatty: Old Buildings, A Fold, and Onward toward Titus Canyon

The Approach to Titus Canyon: Amargosa Narrows, Bullfrog Pit, and the Original Bullfrog Mine

Mineral Monday: Close-Ups of Bullfrog Ore from the Original Bullfrog Mine, Nevada

Accretionary Wedge #50: The Fire at Field Camp

I had been thinking about doing a repost for this wedge—Accretionary Wedge #50: Field Camp/Trip Moments, being hosted by Evelyn Mervine over at Georneys—but realizing that the wedge is supposed to be about *one* fun moment, song, etc, put me into a tiny bit of a quandary  For me, field camp was a long, long time ago. By and large, many of the specifics of my memories of field camp have faded, and some (many?) of the specifics really shouldn't be reported online because they involve other people (plus or minus myself) doing things that shouldn't be reported without the permission of those involved, or shouldn't, perhaps, be reported at all. Not that we were the rowdiest bunch of field camp attendees of all time, or anything; I'm sure we weren't. As for fun field *trip* moments...well, there have been many, and a lot of those fall into the same category of things NSFO (not safe for online). I'll leave you to your imaginations. Or maybe I should just post sometime about shooting and rock throwing contests I've won out in the field...

Back to field camp. One fun or memorable moment or time [there, I've done it: used "fun" as an adjective three times now!] was at our last mapping project in the Swisshelm Mountains of Arizona, helping to fight a range or brush fire that had broken out across part of the map area. It was an exciting thing for a new field geologist to experience; at the same time, there was a certain tension involved: would we succeed? would our map area be ruined? (there were good and bad points to this latter possibility); would we get burned or injured in anyway? For the latter consideration, I think we were mostly in the invincible category at the time and probably didn't think very much about the danger to ourselves or about our overall safety, which was not treated as a huge deal back then the way it is now.

I was mostly involved in shoveling dirt onto hot spots around the edges, and in helping to move water containers to the lines. It was hot and smokey, the visibility was low, and my memory is tinged with orange. Memorable aspects of the day: we joined together in a common cause, we were fed dinner by ranchers also involved in the fire fighting, and the fire was stopped. I'm not sure whether we really cared that much about the range fire, at least not as much as the local ranchers or other fire fighters did, and we made jokes about hoping that the fire would at least burn down the cholla forest located on one of the east-west spurs of the north-south mountain—hoping at long last to be able to map that part of the spur, or to at least be able to walk through the area without massive attacks from stray cholla balls.

No such luck, though. The fire burned through the forest, blackening the cholla and dropping cholla balls all over the area, if anything making the forest more impassable than before.

Afterward, our mapping continued, under what turned out to be more difficult, not less difficult, circumstances: The limestone units and contacts in the upper hills had been reddened and obscured by fire retardant dropped from bombers.

P.S. There is some confusion between jumping cholla and teddy bear cholla, with the former being more likely to grab onto you and being restricted to the deep southwest (California and Arizona deserts), and the latter being somewhat likely to grab onto you and being found as far north as the Gilbert mining district northwest of Tonopah, NV.

This may be a jumping cholla rather than a teddy bear cholla, judging from the pictures shown at the previous USDA links. Keep this video in mind if you ever hear of anyone "flaming" chollas. It might be a case of revenge.

UPDATE 5Oct12: Possibly we stayed here, at Faraway Ranch. The location looks good, the view of the area on Google Maps looks okay, although I can't tell if the buildings are right, and the pond might be gone.

Carnival of the Arid #5 is Up!

Be sure to check out the fifth edition of the Carnival of the Arid (CotA #5) which has been posted by Chris Clarke over at Coyote Crossing. This month, Ole Nielsen joined the ranks of geobloggers who have, at one time or another, entered the carnival. Excellent entries are the norm, as are excellent photos.

I cheated this month, by having two entries, Springtime in the Egan Range and Hiking in the Rain. Both posts show a side of the semi-arid, intermountain west that not everyone gets to see: an abundance of wildflowers during an unusually wet and unusually green spring. And now that we're officially into July, it's still green, it's still unusually wet, and wildflowers are still blooming.