The significant feature is that a stratum that began with creation may lie above one that is an infant in the age of rock—a puzzle that will engage men of Levi Noble’s talents for years to come. But one doesn’t have to be a member of the American Geological Society to find thrills in other gripping features.
Throughout the area south of Shoshone are many hot springs containing boron and fluorine—some with traces of radium. The water is believed to come from a buried river. The source of other hot springs in the Death Valley area is unknown.
More startling features were related to Shorty Harris and me at Bennett’s Well in the bottom of Death Valley where we met one of Shorty’s friends. Lanky and baked brown, in each wrinkle of his face the sun had etched a smile. “Shorty,” he said, “yachts will be sailing around here some day. There’s a passage to the sea, sure as hell.”
“What makes you think so?” Shorty asked.
“Those salt pools. Just come from there. I was watching the crystals; felt the ground move a little. Pool started sloshing. A sea serpent with eyes big as a wagon wheel and teeth full of kelp stuck his head up. Where’d he come from? No kelp in this valley. That prove anything?”
Ubehebe Crater is believed to have resulted from the only major change in the topography of the valley since its return to desert, but John Delameter, old time freighter, thought geologists didn’t know what they were talking about. “When I first saw Saratoga Spring I could straddle it. Full of fish four inches long. Next time, three springs and a lake. Fish shrunk to one inch and different shaped head.”
Actually these fish are the degenerate descendants of the larger fish that lived in the streams and lakes that once watered Death Valley—an interesting study in the survival of species. The real name, Cyprinodon Macularius, is too large a mouthful for the natives so they are called desert sardines, though they are in reality a small killifish.
Dan Breshnahan, in charge of a road crew working between Furnace Creek Inn and Stove Pipe Well, ordered some of the men to dig a hole to sink some piles. Two feet beneath a hard crust they encountered muck. When they hit the pile with a sledge it would bounce back. Dan put a board across the top. With a man on each end of the board, the rebound was prevented and the pile driven into hard earth. “I’m convinced that under that road is a lake of mire and Lord help the fellow who goes through,” Dan said.
A heavily loaded 20 mule team wagon driven by Delameter broke the surface of this ooze and two days were required to get it out. To test the depth, he tied an anvil to his bridle rein and let it down. The lead line of a 20 mule team is 120 feet long. It sank (he said) the length of the line and reached no bottom.
On Ash Meadows, a few miles from Death Valley Junction and on the side of a mountain is what is known as The Devil’s Hole which it is said has no bottom. True or false, none has ever been found.