Stop 9 Beatty Junction Shoreline Deposit
Location: Beatty Junction Road, about 10 miles east of Stovepipe Wells
March 8, 2007

Death Valley National Park is located within the Basin and Range physiographic region of North America.  The Basin and Range region is characterized by long narrow valleys (basins) surrounded by mountains (ranges).  This area, which is now one of the driest places on the continent, during the last Ice Age was fed by glacial meltwater and causing lakes to form in many of the valleys of this region.  The Beatty Junction shoreline deposit is evidence of one of these lakes. The name of this lake was Lake Manly.

This map shows the chain of lakes that was present during the last Ice Age   A view of the Beatty Junction Bar deposit. Looking south along Beatty Junction Road, which bissects the deposit.

We came to this former shoreline to recreate research done by California State University – East Bay on this deposit.  Our class divided into three teams; a laser leveling team, a GPS team, and a ground penetrating radar (GPR) team.   The Laser leveling team: Jac, Eric, and Shana

The GPS team: Korah, Jake, and Brian   The GPR crew: Phil, Pat, Dave, Jen, and Mike

The GPS team’s objective was to flag the lines that CSU-EB had run their GPR on.  Once this was done the GPR team could run their lines on the exact places the CSU-EB had run their lines.  The laser leveling crew’s job was to topographically correct the GPR lines.   This map was created from the information gathered by the GPS team.

For more information on the work that we did please look at the posters that each group created for UWEC poster day. GPS      GPR      Laser Level

By Jake McDonald