Desert Daze - A Southwest Adventure (XXIV)

Part Twenty-Four: Willow Creek Canyon Falls and the Bighorn Sheep

(First time reading this 'Desert Daze' story? Scroll down to 'Older Posts' to start with Part One)

Or rather, his skeleton, but I’ll get to that…

For the second waterfall hike of the day, I tackle Willow Creek Canyon. The first section of the route is pure drudgery; it’s more than a mile across a vast, ankle-twisting alluvial fan before even reaching the canyon mouth. (An alluvial fan is an outspread, gently sloping mass of alluvium [rocks and sand] deposited by a stream, especially in an arid or semiarid region where a stream issues from a narrow canyon onto a plain or valley floor. Viewed from above, it has the shape of an open fan, the apex being at the valley mouth.) There is not even a hint of water here, just rocks, sand and more rocks and sand.

When I finally do reach the mouth of the canyon and enter it, there is still no sign of water. I hope the waterfalls are running since that is the whole point of this hike. After about another three-quarters of a mile of trudging through shifting sand and loose rock, the canyon abruptly narrows into not much more than a deep crack in the mountain wall. Not long after that, water magically appears in the form of a pretty, little gurgling stream, the music of which reverberates pleasantly off the canyon walls. I realize now that the water was with me all along but deep down in the sand whereas here there is only solid rock, nowhere for it to hide.

With the discovery of water, my enthusiasm is now rekindled and I practically sprint up the narrow defile until I reach my goal – the waterfall.

There it is and it’s a nice one, spilling and splashing down a fifty foot wall. I’ve read that there is a way up and around the waterfall, with more waterfalls upstream but this is the end of the hike for me, I’ve done enough today and I’m not about to attack a fifty foot wall.

I’ve enjoyed two waterfalls in one day in otherwise bone-dry Death Valley, who would’ve thought? I turn to go back, but as I turn, something in my peripheral vision causes me to look right. There, at the base of the wall is a skeleton! It’s of a bighorn sheep! I guess even these normally surefooted animals slip once in a while. Before today, I hadn’t even realized that bighorn sheep inhabited Death Valley, I thought they only lived in much colder climes - but here lying at my feet was irrefutable evidence to the contrary.

With my hiking and solitude urges satisfied for the day, I leave the waterfall and skeleton behind and trudge back through all that sand and rock to where I started. At least this way is downhill. Finally, I spy Hotel Truck waiting patiently in the distance for the next adventure. When I reach ‘er, I climb in, start ‘er up, and get back on the road pointing ‘er west towards my next destination: the deepest mountain valley in the lower 48.

Next: Mountains to the Left of Me, Mountains to the Right, Here I Am, Stuck in the Valley - Great View!

Desert Daze: A Southwest Adventure (XXIII)

Part Twenty-Three: Death Valley Waterfalls

(First time reading this 'Desert Daze' story? Scroll down to 'Older Posts' to start with Part One)

A river runs through it. No really – as I drive across the park, each time I reach a low point in the road, a stream is running across it causing me to have to slow down, as the water is up to a foot deep in places. Bizarre, considering where I am.

Almost all the other roads in the park are still closed - washed out, sand covered or, in the case of higher elevations, snowy and icy. These conditions deny me access to most of the park and make me a little claustrophobic. After a week and a half of solitude and open spaces, of seeing few vehicles and even fewer people, this feels like a small city – hustle and bustle, traffic and people milling about - all trapped in this one section of the park.

As mentioned in an earlier post, I no longer visit most National Parks because they have become so crowded they no longer feel wild at all. (I call the valley portion of Yosemite “Yosemi-City”; there is no longer a ‘slow season’ there to visit, just always lots of vehicles spewing exhaust with long lines of traffic commonplace.) DV has never suffered this problem because it’s vast and, with the exception of today, visitors are usually spread out over the entire park.

Therefore, I need to escape. My plan: I’ll hike to a couple of remote waterfalls. Waterfalls you say? In DV? No, not the extremely temporary kind created by all the rain whose lives can be measured in hours, but one that is year-round and another that, fed by snowmelt from the surrounding mountains, runs for about six months of the year. Both hikes are upstream and long enough to discourage those who aren’t willing (or able) to make the effort – and that’s most people – so I’m assuming I’ll encounter few others. I’m right; in fact, I do not see another soul in either location. I have my tranquility back.

I decide to hike to Darwin Falls first. This waterfall is truly an anomaly in the middle of the desert. It's fed by the China Garden Spring high up in the hills which consistently produces enough water to supply the creek and falls all year (along with the nearby tiny settlement of Panamint Springs.) I make my way upstream towards the falls through luxuriant growth that effectively shields the creek bed from the parched desert all around it. If I had somehow been plopped down here with no clue as to where I was and without seeing the surrounding desert, even my wildest guesses probably wouldn’t include DV.

I spy a pipe running alongside the creek – it’s no larger than a few inches in diameter. The entire water supply of Panamint Springs runs through this conduit. I reach the falls. A single ‘fall’ charmingly splits into two as it makes its way down the rock face. Small by almost any standard, these falls may as well be Niagara Falls to me today - I think they are just spectacular. Surrounded by lush growth - trees, shrubs, and even several hanging fern gardens

and with birds high up in the trees singing praises of the place, I feel like I have found the mythical Garden of Eden. I sit down in the shade to eat my lunch serenaded by the always alluring melodies of falling water and beautiful birdsong – in the middle of the desert - magical!

Next: Willow Creek Canyon Falls and the Bighorn Sheep

Trees and the August 9 Storm, cont’d.

So, what about the trees? I hadn’t had a chance to go hiking since the storm and didn’t see many trees down while driving around town so I just assumed there wasn’t much of that kind of damage. I was wrong. On a recent hike through the forest near my house, I found plenty of trees down, some yanked right out of the ground, root ball and all and others snapped off. A good number of these trees were quite large and had weathered many a storm before succumbing to this one; it was obvious that it had been particularly violent.

An undisturbed forest with few holes in its canopy can usually weather storms pretty well. This is because any particular tree can only bend as far as the tree next it and that tree as far as the one next to it and so on, providing a natural stopping point for each. However, where there are holes in the canopy, some trees have nothing to ‘lean on’, and, especially, from late spring through early fall when they are fully leafed out, powerful winds can catch a tree top and bend it so far that something has to give – it either uproots or the trunk snaps. The forest near my house had been selectively logged in the not too distant past and obviously suffered the consequences of holes in its canopy from this storm.

In contrast, yesterday I had a chance to walk through some old-growth forest, untouched by the hand of man. This forest is full of magnificent trees, some with trunks three, four and even five foot wide and attaining heights of over 100 feet – here the canopy was mostly unbroken. What a difference. I had to look hard to find any damage from the storm at all.

But I did notice something weird that affected both forests - the ground had been swept clean in many places, the leaves and branches that usually litter a forest floor were gone, even on gentle slopes –somehow it just looked naked. I have hiked in forests a gazillion times in my life and had never seen such a clean sweep; the storm rainfall rate and quantity must have been incredible. According to the National Weather Service, the town of Perrysburg (near Gowanda where there were devastating floods) received six inches of rain in about an hour and a half – an amount and rate on par with hurricanes and tropical storms!

So where did all the leaves and branches go? Into the gullies and ravines. There, I found great tangles caught on tree trucks, roots and rocks; in some places the piles were as tall as me! The storm of August 9 significantly changed the look and feel of local forest landscapes for some time to come.