"Strongly recommend to not do camping there. Wind is very bad. It was like sand storm and we didn’t get any information regarding it. So we spent whole night in car. Our tent was damaged and we saw almost 50% of people leaving in the middle of the night. That situation was scary and dangerous."
For #MountainMonday here is colorful Mount Perry, a peak in the northern Black Mountains of Death Valley National Park.
The hike to Mount Perry's summit starts at Dante's View and is pretty much "uphill both ways", with a distance of 8.5 miles. From Dante's View one first loses about 800 feet in elevation — and then has to gain it back. And the same on the way back out of course. 🤪
I've got some neat-o rock pix from near Death Valley. (Rock thread!)
These are from a pass will outside the park, between Chicago basin and Pahrump, NV. But this rock unit occurs in a remote part of Death Valley, too.
These particular rocks were float, not attached to bedrock.
This rock is part of a very old (>500 MYA) pre-Cambrian unit. It is pretty well silicified and has fractures filled in with more resistant minerals. They stand proud after erosion of wraker stuff.
Here is another example from same location. Also float.
This rock is a Cambrian carbonate from the Bonanza King formation. It is limestone/dolomite.
This rock was deposited in limey mud ooze. Built up in layers. (Horizontal in this image). Then fractured and those fractures eroded through dissolution.
Note how some of the straight-line fractures do not go all the way through the rock. Very orthogonal.
Now I'm gonna show you a special kind of rock. It is called "my favorite rock right now".
(Every geologist has one. Everyone should have one.)
This rock is a mix of rougher grayish carbonate and more smooth buff-colored carbonate-cemented mudstone parts.
The carbonate is a mix of limestone and dolomite. Dolomite formation is funky. Happened way after limstone deposited. Wetting and drying with magnesium-rich fluids changed composition. Dolomite holds finer structures.
Let's take a closer look at that carbonate rock, especially the gray dolomite parts.
There is A LOT of fun detail in there. Zoom in close and check it out. Those little tiny channels are called microkarren. They form from super thin sheets of liquid (like dew) condensing and dissolving bits of rock as it creeps down due to gravity.
Here is an image of pyramid-like star dunes in the western part of Mesquite Dunes in Death Valley during a windstorm. These are accessible from the Mesquite Dunes parking area. It is usually pretty crowded.
But we are going to check out the far eastern area of Mesquite Dunes. There is a small parking area over there that is rarely visited. You can wander into the dunes and interdunes and find some especially interesting features....
Wind and depostion in this area are going every which way. Very complicated.
Here is an example of former deposition layers inside a dune, maybe very slightly cohesive from dampness or sats, now being re-exposed by wind.
These were paper-thin and fragile. (And very satisfying to crunch by hand.) They were like sugar wafers. A little stronger wind and they will either carve up or get blasted away.
As blow-out basins expand and coalesce, you get interdune landscapes like this with little remnant mesaa. Those are areas that were between the coalescing blow-out basins
Eventually. They will erode down too. But by then maybe blow out basins will start on the next laya level down.
This is why Death Valley National Park is such a nice analog for Titan science. It has a lot of processes going on that modifies the landscape. Pluvial (rainfall), fluvial (overland flow), karstic (dissolving and underground flow) and eolian (wind), lacrustine (lake), and evaporitic (chemical precipitation).
And depostion and erosion happening.
Its really neat wandering out here and trying to imagine how Titan would be similar or different, and why.