Ancient Gems of Bighorn Gorge | Cottonwoods #4

Knowing that we had a huge hike in front of us, we worked our way high into the Cottonwood Mountains after returning from our hike to Leaning Rock just before 6:00pm, already an hour after dark. Having never driven White Top Mountain Road, the circuitous route remained a mystery as we pulled into a spot that we hoped would have a nice view once when the sun completed its circumnavigation of the globe.

Even as we set up the tent for the night it was freezing. Luckily, @mrs.turbodb had already prepped sandwiches - at the same time we'd prepped our Thanksgiving lunch of chicken pad thai - and after deploying camp, we climbed back into the warm cab for a quick meal.

It wasn't yet 7:00pm when we finished brushing our teeth and climbed under our cold comforters for nearly 12 hours of shut eye. We'd need every minute of that rest to tackle a14-mile hike - with a little less than 10-hours of daylight - in the morning.

When we climbed down the ladder a few minutes before sunrise, every bit of water we had with us was frozen. Knowing that this was a possibility, we'd filled all of our bottles and bladders the previous evening. We'd stored them in the cab, but like the 5-gallon jerry can in the bed of the Tacoma, they were solid in the 18°F morning air. Still, had we waited until morning, the lack of water would have meant that we'd have had to scrap the hike, so we counted our blessings as we shivered through cereal and assembled sandwiches for later in the day.

By 7:30am, the Tacoma was repositioned so the solar panel would capture as much sunlight as possible throughout the day, and we were bushwacking our way into the upper folds of Bighorn Gorge.

Bighorn Gorge is one of Death Valley's uncontested gems, a long, rugged, and isolated canyon that tumbles from pine woodlands and Joshua, trees down through tight polished narrows with falls and beautiful fossils to finally open up at the top of its massive fan overlooking the valley. Because it is one of the most remote canyons in the park, the price to pay to discover it is a lot of walking. With a high-clearance vehicle you can drive fairly close and explore a good part of it in a day, but otherwise it will have to be an overnight trip. Either way, Bighorn. Gorge is for serious, well-trained hikers only.

Hiking Death Valley - Michel Digonnet

The upper drainage of Bighorn Gorge is a large basin where several broad, steep valleys converge from the crest of the Cottonwood Mountains. Winding nearly four miles and dropping nearly 2,000 feet before reaching the narrows that give the gorge its name. Unlike the long-but-straightforward alluvial fans that we're used to traversing on our way to explore a canyon, this is a densely forested - with pinyon pine and juniper - drainage, boulders and dry falls slowing our progress. Even so, this terrain is one of the delights of hiking down from the top.

After a mile and a half, we reached the timberline. Here, the drainage broadened to a beautiful valley, Joshua Trees and colorful hillsides of shale spilled toward the gorge. The hiking here - down the sandy wash - was easier, though we knew the return trip would be a soft-surface slog at the end of an already long day.

A little more than two hours - and 3.5 miles - after entering the drainage, the gravelly, wide wash disappeared into a narrow gorge. How all that stone could coalesce through such a small space was mindboggling.  We'd soon discover the effect of so much material, but first we had to marvel at the high, striated walls of the entrance to the upper gorge.

Spectacularly tall, the walls were delightfully imposing in their sheer physical dimensions. Layers of limestone and sandstone, embedded with dolomite, pushed up at impossible angles as they reached for the sky. We'd have been thrilled to experience this scenery the entire way. Little did we know that it would only get better!

For the next 3.5 miles, we'd experience no fewer than five narrows. While mostly short - between 500 and 2000 feet long, these sinuous passages were spectacular, a few falls and chockstones adding fun problems to tackle on the way down - and up - but not generally presenting any real dangerous difficulty to the adventure.

With one exception.

Shortly after entering the first narrows - at a tight bend in the canyon - the ground seemed to drop out from under us as it plunged more than 60 feet over a majestic fall, quickly followed by a 15-foot drop to the new base of the gorge. With no ropes - or the skills to use them - we were lucky that a bypass - on the west side - allowed only a moderate amount of risk, followed by a fun scramble down a steep talus of furniture-sized boulders where we could admire the fall from below.

Excited, we reveled in the reflected light and tight turns of the five narrows. Each of these featured gentle chutes and near-vertical plunges, but it was the second and fourth narrows where we found the most interesting falls. Even these - each approximately 15 feet high, slick, and nearly vertical - were easily accomplished with a bit of bridging and companion-provided bracing where finger and toe holds had been worn smooth by the mountains of gravel that had flowed over the stone.

Less than a thousand feet after the first narrows, we entered the second. Somewhat wider, water moved through this section of canyon more slowly. This left the high, nearly vertical walls with a jagged texture, rather than polished smooth as we'd seen in the first narrows.

The third narrows were the windiest and tightest, resulting in a finely polished surface where gravels routinely ground their way along the walls, 10 feet above the gravelly wash. Narrow enough to touch both sides of the slot at the same time, these were the most exhilarating of the narrows, and a place where we could have spent an entire day!

There was only a single spot - near the head of the fourth narrows - where @mrs.turbodb was "really not happy" with the downclimb that was necessary to continue on. Looking over the top of a polished 12-foot fall - with no holds to be found - a pile of rocks stacked at the bottom suggested her reservations were justified, and while down is usually the more difficult direction to climb, it is also the easier direction to fall. Rarely does gravity assist in the upward direction.

Still, after I bridged my way down and braced my gloved hands against the smooth stone - anchor points for her feet - she worked her way over the edge and we continued on our way!

Beginning just before the third narrows - with the highest exposures in-and-below the fourth narrows - the limestone canyon walls were littered with fossils. Initially these came as a delightful surprise, our eyes scouring the smooth surfaces so we wouldn't miss a thing. It didn't take long to realize that no one wandering this way could possibly do so without noticing the shells, so plentiful were they in the smooth, polished walls.

The fossils are marine shells, probably from the Early Paleozoic, distributed on several horizons in the thick limestone. The polishing action of water has revealed them as pale, curly traces against the smooth, darker rock. They resemble the common shells found on today's beaches - bivalves, snails, and the slender, conical spirals of gastropods, smaller than an inch. The most striking are large fossils, probably ammonites, curling around several times, often 3 or 4 inches across. They are so finely preserved that some of them still show the inner chambers the animal filled with air for buoyancy.

Hiking Death Valley

Just before the top of the fifth narrows - now approaching a main side canyon that would mark 7 miles from the trailhead and our turnaround point - we ran into an overhung dry fall that had us wondering whether this should be the end of our excursion. Ultimately, I decided to press on, with @mrs.turbodb enjoying the sun in a wide part of the wash as I scrambled around the dry fall and picked up my pace down the final half mile of canyon.

Knowing that daylight was quickly fading - it was already 12:35pm - I raced my way back up the fifth narrows, the sandy gravel wash making every step significantly more difficult than they'd been on the way down. Within twenty minutes, I'd found my companion, and she'd found the perfect spot for us to enjoy the lunches she'd assembled in freezing temps, several hours earlier.

As we ate - and drank from our still-icy water bottles - I shared some of the discoveries I'd found once I'd left her behind.

We'd used up more than half of our daylight on the "easy" direction of the hike. Knowing we had many miles - and more than 3,500 feet of elevation - to regain before climbing out of the canyon, the only way we were going to make it before dark, was if we maintained a 2mph pace, about double our usual average.

And the only way we were going to do that was if I could find a way to leave my camera on my hip.

Somehow - likely due to the fact that I'd failed to pack a second battery - I managed to mostly succeed at hiking through - rather than stopping to admire - the gorgeous warm light that reflected down the towering walls as we made our way back through the narrows.

Mostly.

Seven minutes after sunset, and with legs seemingly made of jello, we emerged at the top of the Cottonwood Mountains to a brilliant show above our heads. It was 4:47pm.

It'd been a whirlwind three days in the park. We'd covered more than 30 miles of canyons in our first significant push into the Cottonwoods. In the process, we'd discovered several additional places we wanted to explore. Places, we hoped, we would return to experience in a few short weeks!

 

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