Tule Valley (also known as White Valley) is a valley in

Millard County Millard County ( ) is a county in the U.S. state of Utah. As of the 2010 United States Census, the population was 12,503. Its county seat is Fillmore, and the largest city is Delta. History The Utah Territory legislature created the county o ...

Utah Utah ( , ) is a state in the Mountain West subregion of the Western United States. Utah is a landlocked U.S. state bordered to its east by Colorado, to its northeast by Wyoming, to its north by Idaho, to its south by Arizona, and to it ...

, United States.

Description

The valley is a north-south trending

endorheic An endorheic basin (; also spelled endoreic basin or endorreic basin) is a drainage basin that normally retains water and allows no outflow to other external bodies of water, such as rivers or oceans, but drainage converges instead into lakes ...

valley within the Great Basin (geographically),

Great Basin Desert The Great Basin Desert is part of the Great Basin between the Sierra Nevada (U.S.), Sierra Nevada and the Wasatch Range. The desert is a geographical region that largely overlaps the Great Basin shrub steppe defined by the World Wildlife Fund, a ...

(ecologically), and

Basin and Range Province The Basin and Range Province is a vast physiographic region covering much of the inland Western United States and northwestern Mexico. It is defined by unique basin and range topography, characterized by abrupt changes in elevation, alternating ...

(

tectonic Tectonics (; ) are the processes that control the structure and properties of the Earth's crust and its evolution through time. These include the processes of mountain building, the growth and behavior of the strong, old cores of continents ...

ally) of west-central Utah.Schneider, Bill and Ann Seifert, ''Hiking Utah,'' Falcon, 2005, p. 102
It is bounded on the west by the

Confusion Range The Confusion Range is a north-south trending mountain range in west-central Utah, United States. It is bounded by Snake Valley to the west, Tule Valley to the east, the Great Salt Lake Desert to the north, and the Ferguson Desert to the south ...

, on the east by the

House Range The House Range is a north-south trending mountain range in Millard County, of west-central Utah. The House Range was named in 1859 by James H. Simpson. It was named by Simpson because "...of its well-defined stratification and the resemblance ...

, to the north by the Middle Range and the

Great Salt Lake Desert The Great Salt Lake Desert (colloquially referred to as the West Desert) is a large dry lake in northern Utah, United States, between the Great Salt Lake and the Nevada border. It is a subregion of the larger Great Basin Desert, and noted for wh ...

, and the south by Wah Wah Valley and the Wah Wah Mountains. The central part of the valley has several

knoll In geography, knoll is another term for a knowe or hillock, a small, low, round natural hill or mound. Knoll may also refer to: Places * Knoll Camp, site of an Iron Age hill fort Hampshire, England, United Kingdom * Knoll Lake, Leonard Canyon, A ...

s, the largest of which is Coyote Knolls. The White Valley name comes from the abundance of white rocks noted by James H. Simpson in 1859.Van Cott, J. W., 1990, Utah Place Names, These rocks are mostly

Lake Bonneville Lake Bonneville was the largest Late Pleistocene paleolake in the Great Basin of western North America. It was a pluvial lake that formed in response to an increase in precipitation and a decrease in evaporation as a result of cooler temperature ...

marls in the valley floor.

Geographic features

Tule Valley's most prominent feature may be Coyote Springs, an important spring system for local wildlife and

feral A feral () animal or plant is one that lives in the wild but is descended from domesticated individuals. As with an introduced species, the introduction of feral animals or plants to non-native regions may disrupt ecosystems and has, in some ...

horse The horse (''Equus ferus caballus'') is a domesticated, one-toed, hoofed mammal. It belongs to the taxonomic family Equidae and is one of two extant subspecies of ''Equus ferus''. The horse has evolved over the past 45 to 55 million yea ...

s, which populate the valley. It is also used as a gateway to viewing and traveling toward the base of Notch Peak, a

carbonate rock Carbonate rocks are a class of sedimentary rocks composed primarily of carbonate minerals. The two major types are limestone, which is composed of calcite or aragonite (different crystal forms of CaCO3), and dolomite rock (also known as dolosto ...

cliff ( of which is pure vertical drop), the tallest carbonate cliff in North America. The name "

Tule ''Schoenoplectus acutus'' ( syn. ''Scirpus acutus, Schoenoplectus lacustris, Scirpus lacustris'' subsp. ''acutus''), called tule , common tule, hardstem tule, tule rush, hardstem bulrush, or viscid bulrush, is a giant species of sedge in the pl ...

" is a reference to a swamp plant that probably was found at Coyote Springs during the early exploration of the valley. The valley itself is very isolated and only has one paved road through its southern end,

U.S. Route 6 U.S. Route 6 (US 6), also called the Grand Army of the Republic Highway, honoring the American Civil War veterans association, is a main route of the U.S. Highway system. While it currently runs east-northeast from Bishop, California, to P ...

/ U.S. Route 50. There are no permanent human residents of the valley, though shepherds are known to populate it in the spring. The center of the valley is a large playa, the place where all precipitation from the drainage basin collects, since it is an isolated basin and watershed. This is the location of the lowest point in

Millard County, Utah Millard County ( ) is a county in the U.S. state of Utah. As of the 2010 United States Census, the population was 12,503. Its county seat is Fillmore, and the largest city is Delta. History The Utah Territory legislature created the county o ...

. The Ibex Crags offer "world class" bouldering to climbers. They are located on the eastern edge of the Great Basin.

Geology

The geology of Tule Valley consists of Quaternary

alluvial Alluvium (from Latin ''alluvius'', from ''alluere'' 'to wash against') is loose clay, silt, sand, or gravel that has been deposited by running water in a stream bed, on a floodplain, in an alluvial fan or beach, or in similar settings. All ...

sediment Sediment is a naturally occurring material that is broken down by processes of weathering and erosion, and is subsequently transported by the action of wind, water, or ice or by the force of gravity acting on the particles. For example, sa ...

s punctuated by chalky white

Pleistocene The Pleistocene ( , often referred to as the ''Ice age'') is the geological epoch that lasted from about 2,580,000 to 11,700 years ago, spanning the Earth's most recent period of repeated glaciations. Before a change was finally confirmed in ...

marls. The valley is a true graben in the sense that it is down-faulted by

normal fault In geology, a fault is a planar fracture or discontinuity in a volume of rock across which there has been significant displacement as a result of rock-mass movements. Large faults within Earth's crust result from the action of plate tecton ...

s on both sides of the valley. The knolls in the valley are horsts of Silurian to Devonian

carbonates A carbonate is a salt of carbonic acid (H2CO3), characterized by the presence of the carbonate ion, a polyatomic ion with the formula . The word ''carbonate'' may also refer to a carbonate ester, an organic compound containing the carbonate g ...

Tule Valley watershed

The Tule Valley

hydrologic unit A hydrological code or hydrologic unit code is a sequence of numbers or letters (a ''geocode'') that identify a hydrological unit or feature, such as a river, river reach, lake, or area like a drainage basin (also called watershed in North America ...

is an area of several Utah valleys and ridgelines of the Basin and Range Province. The

watershed's volume of surface water averages .

References

External links

{{Geographic Location , Northwest = Snake Valley ( Deep Creek Mountains) , North = Fish Range Fla

( Fish Springs National Wildlife Refuge, Fish Springs Range) , Northeast = ( Middle Range, north of Marjum Canyonbr>
, West = Blind Valley/Barn Hill

&
Snake Valley (

) , Centre = basins (& demarcating ranges)
bordering the Tule Valley , East=

& ( Whirlwind Valley) , Southwest = , South = Wah Wah Valley ( Mountains) , Southeast =

Sevier Lake Sevier Lake is an intermittent and endorheic lake which lies in the lowest part of the Sevier Desert, Millard County, Utah. Like Great Salt Lake and Utah Lake, it is a remnant of Pleistocene Lake Bonneville. Sevier Lake is fed primarily by t ...