Titus Canyon, Death Valley
Titus Canyon is a deep, narrow gorge cut into the steep face of the Grapevine Mountains of the Mojave Desert, within Death Valley National Park.The canyon features limestone rock formations, petroglyphs, and native plants and wildlife.
Titus Canyon is located on the east side of Death Valley. Access by foot from the west via Death Valley Road, or by vehicles from the east via Nevada. The one-way rough dirt road access begins west of the town of Beatty, Nevada. Vehicle travel is allowed only east to west through Titus Canyon, from the Daylight Pass Road (Nevada Highway 374) 2 miles east of park boundary road, over a pass, and down to the mouth of the canyon in Death Valley on the west. Although the Grapevine Mountains were uplifted relatively recently, most of the rocks that make up the range are over half a billion years old. The gray rocks lining the walls of the western end of Titus Canyon are Cambrian age (570–505 million years old) limestone. These ancient Paleozoic rocks formed at a time when the Death Valley area was submerged beneath tropical seas. The sediments have since been upturned and folded in many different directions. Timbisha Native Americans carved petroglyphs on some of the rock faces in Titus Canyon.
Adjacent to the canyon proper is Leadfield, a former mining town and now a ghost town where in the 1920s prospectors mined for ore after hearing exaggerated claims that lead would be easy to find and the living conditions in the area would be easy to endure. This text taken in part from Titus Canyon by multiply authors and is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License |
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