Gower Gulch (Death Valley)
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Gower Gulch is a small gulch on the eastern side of
Death Valley Death Valley is a desert valley in Eastern California, in the northern Mojave Desert, bordering the Great Basin Desert. It is thought to be the Highest temperature recorded on Earth, hottest place on Earth during summer. Death Valley's Badwat ...
in
Inyo County, California Inyo County () is a County (United States), county in the Eastern California, eastern central part of the U.S. state of California, located between the Sierra Nevada and the state of Nevada. In the 2020 United States census, 2020 census, the po ...
. It is located in the Black Mountains. Gower Gulch is visible from
Zabriskie Point Zabriskie Point is a part of the Amargosa Range located east of Death Valley in Death Valley National Park in California, United States, noted for its erosional landscape. It is composed of sediments from Furnace Creek Lake, which dried up 5 mil ...
and is about one and a half miles long.


History

Gower Gulch is named after Harry P. Gower, an official of the Pacific Coast Borax Company and co-owner of the Furnace Creek Inn and Ranch, before Death Valley became a national monument. The gulch contained mines, camps, and roads during the late 19th century and early 20th century.


Geology

Gower Gulch passes through three geological formations: *the Badlands in the easternmost portion *the Artist's Palette Formation mid channel *the Playa Formation at the channel head. There are two areas of dry waterfalls: the Upper Knickzone near
Zabriskie Point Zabriskie Point is a part of the Amargosa Range located east of Death Valley in Death Valley National Park in California, United States, noted for its erosional landscape. It is composed of sediments from Furnace Creek Lake, which dried up 5 mil ...
and the Lower Knickzone near the gulch's
Alluvial fan An alluvial fan is an accumulation of sediments that fans outwards from a concentrated source of sediments, such as a narrow canyon emerging from an escarpment. They are characteristic of mountainous terrain in arid to Semi-arid climate, semiar ...
. The tallest fall, at the head of the alluvial fan, is approximately 25 ft. high, the only way around it being a ledge on the northern side of the fan. The alluvial fan has a deep channel, called a telescoping channel, that runs north-west from Gower Gulch's mouth.


Mining

Gower Gulch was mined in after the 1880s, when a road starting at the northern side of Zabriskie Point was built by the Pacific Coast Borax Company. This road allowed wagons and autos to reach the ten
borax The BORAX Experiments were a series of safety experiments on boiling water nuclear reactors conducted by Argonne National Laboratory in the 1950s and 1960s at the National Reactor Testing Station in eastern Idaho.
mine claims in the gulch. many of these mines are still visible today, though mines on the floor bed of Gower Gulch have been filled in with sediment from past floods.


Diversion

In 1941 a Furnace Creek-Gower Gulch Flood diversion channel was blasted upstream from Zabriskie Point to divert flood waters from the Furnace Creek Wash and the resorts into Gower Gulch. The diversion increased the size of Gower Gulch's
drainage basin A drainage basin is an area of land in which all flowing surface water converges to a single point, such as a river mouth, or flows into another body of water, such as a lake or ocean. A basin is separated from adjacent basins by a perimeter, ...
from 2.77 km2 to 455.63 km2, an increase of 16,348%. As a result, massive erosion of the channel took place as debris from Furnace Creek were channeled into Gower Gulch. Today the diversion has sunk to over 20 feet deep with two dry falls, one three feet and another ten feet high.


References


Death Valley Historic Resource Study A History of Mining
*Schultz, Lisa (2005). "Investigation of the Transient Response of Gower Gulch to Forced Diversion, Death Valley, California." Boston College, The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Department of Geology and Geophysics.


See also

* Death Valley {{Death Valley Death Valley Landforms of Inyo County, California Canyons and gorges of California