Nothing seems less relevant at the moment, but I thought I'd offer a few more thoughts and pictures related to the Death Valley article that appeared in last week's issue of the magazine — the one that said "Oh, Sweet Jesus Please God No" on the cover. The piece is unlike anything I've done in my twenty years at the magazine, and I am intensely grateful to my editors — and to Daniel Zalewski in particular — for letting escape into the desert for a little while.
As the errant scion of a long line of geologists, I was happy to return to the fold and write a bit about rocks. My grandfather Clarence Samuel Ross (1880-1975) was a longtime mineralogist and petrologist at the US Geological Survey. I hardly remember him — he died when I was seven — but we have a literary love in common, as I related on the New Yorker Radio Hour some weeks back: Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop was one of his favorite books, and it is also one of mine. Levi Noble, who developed the "Amargosa Chaos" model of Death Valley geology, was a contemporary of my grandfather's at the Survey; perhaps they ran into each other out in the dusty expanses of the Southwest. In 1996, John McPhee, author of monumental New Yorker articles on geological subjects, included my grandfather in "Balloons of War," an account of the Japanese balloon bombs of World War II. C. S. Ross is described there as "an oddball guy, not sociable, a damned good man on rocks." His ashes are scattered in the Valles Caldera, in New Mexico.
Darrel Cowan, my geological guide in Death Valley, was much taken with this complex of limestone and calcite in Titus Canyon:
The Amargosa Chaos in action, as geological layers are twisted at strange angles:
The astonishing volcanic landscape of Ubehebe Crater:
An overhead view of the valley, from Dante's View:
Other scenes of the ever-changing topography:
In April, snow lingers on Telescope Peak:
In Shoshone CA, where Darrel Cowan helps to run a facility called SHEAR:
The biologist Susanne Douglas, with her students, at Badwater Basin:
The microbial samples they brought back:
Scenes of Death Valley wildflowers:
The desert five-spot:
The healthy young Joshua trees of Lee Flat:
Pupfish, tenacious survivors of Death Valley's Ice Age lake:
The Amargosa Opera House in Death Valley Junction:
The dancer Marta Becket, who performed at the opera house for decades, is now ninety-two, and still lives in Death Valley Junction. Last summer, Jenna McClintock, a former dancer with the Oakland Ballet, revived some of Becket's dances:
The ghost town of Rhyolite, Nevada:
Dangling on a fence were the glass bottles that Chris Killmyer recorded for his sound installation RHYOLITE:
The famous lost sedan of Johnson Canyon:
A road at Scotty's Castle, obliterated by the freak storm of October 2015:
The villa itself, a lavish 1920s creation that rivals Hearst's San Simeon, is largely undamaged, although repairing the infrastructure around it will require millions of dollars:
At the Park Service's Celestial Centennial, a glimpse of the Whirlpool Galaxy:
From the Eastern California Museum, in Independence CA:
Sunrise at Mahogany Flat, elevation eight thousand feet. Death Valley is the white patch on the lower right:
On Telescope Peak in August, the bloom is still in progress:
The Arcane Meadow:
A fellow hiker:
At the summit, looking south down the Panamint Range:
In the summit log, the meaning of life is revealed:
The panarama at the summit: first Death Valley, then the Panamints, then Panamint Valley.
The road out — the Trona-Wildrose Road in Panamint Valley. I took this picture in 1999, on my first visit to one of the world's most bizarrely beautiful places:
.