Morris Ranch Road, Sunrise Highway S-1
Desert Rider in Carrizo Gorge Trestle
see also –
Cleveland National Forest Map
Cleveland Forest Atlas
Laguna Mountains Trail Map
San Diego Backcountry Map
San Diego Country Trail Map
Death Valley Road Trip, Camping Death Valley National Park, Mojave Desert California
Dante’s View, DVNP
Death Valley is a desert valley in Eastern California, in the northern Mojave Desert, bordering the Great Basin Desert. It is one of the hottest places on Earth.
The Badwater Basin is the point of lowest elevation in North America, at 282 feet below sea level. It is located 85 miles east-southeast of Mount Whitney, the highest point in the contiguous United States, with an elevation of 14,505 feet.
The highest point in Death Valley National Park is Telescope Peak, in the Panamint Range, which has an elevation of 11,043 feet. This is one of the few spots that you can see the lowest point and the highest peak in the lower 48 states.
Lying mostly in Inyo County, California, near the border of California and Nevada, in the Great Basin, east of the Sierra Nevada mountains, Death Valley constitutes much of Death Valley National Park and is the principal feature of the Mojave and Colorado Deserts Biosphere Reserve. It runs from north to south between the Amargosa Range on the east and the Panamint Range on the west; the Grapevine Mountains and the Owlshead Mountains form its northern and southern boundaries, respectively. It has an area of about 3,000 sq miles.
Death Valley has a subtropical, hot desert climate, with long, extremely hot summers; short, mild winters; and little rainfall.
The valley is extremely dry, because it lies in the rain shadow of four major mountain ranges (including the Sierra Nevada and Panamint Range). Moisture moving inland from the Pacific Ocean must pass eastward over the mountains to reach Death Valley; as air masses are forced upward by each range, they cool and moisture condenses, to fall as rain or snow on the western slopes. When the air masses reach Death Valley, most of the moisture has already been lost and there is little left to fall as precipitation.
see also –
Death Valley Topo Map
Benchmark California Atlas
Inyo National Forest Map
Inyo Forest Topo Atlas
Jawbone Canyon Map
Amargosa Opera House @ Death Valley Junction
Find Ansel Adams Wilderness Maps
Mono Lake at Sunset
The Ansel Adams Wilderness is a wilderness area in the Sierra Nevada of California, United States. The wilderness spans 231,533 acres – much of which is located inside the Inyo and Sierra National Forests, and the remaining acres covers nearly all of Devils Postpile National Monument. Yosemite National Park lies to the north and northwest, while the John Muir Wilderness lies to the south.
The wilderness was established as part of the original Wilderness Act in 1964 as the Minarets Wilderness. The 109,500-acre Minarets Wilderness was created by enlarging and renaming the Mount Dana-Minarets Primitive Area. In 1984, after his death, the area was expanded and renamed in memory of Ansel Adams, well-known environmentalist and nature photographer who is famous for his black-and-white landscape photographs of the Sierra Nevada.
The Ansel Adams wilderness spans in elevation from 3,500 to 13,157 feet, forming the northern end of the High Sierra. The centerpiece of the Ansel Adams wilderness is the Ritter Range, which includes dark meta-volcanic glaciated mountains such as Mount Ritter, Banner Peak, and The Minarets.
Immediately to the east of the Ritter Range is the Middle Fork of the San Joaquin River, which contains Devils Postpile, a series of basaltic columns that were revealed and smoothed by glacier action. The Middle Fork originates from Thousand Island Lake, at the foot of Banner Peak, one of the largest backcountry lakes in the Sierra.
To the east of the Middle Fork canyon is the true Sierra Crest, which, at roughly 10,000 feet of elevation is lower than the Ritter Range. This relatively low region of the Crest allows winter storms through and cause large amounts of snowfall on Mammoth Mountain, which sits in the gap. The gap also allows migration of plants and animals across the Sierra Crest.
To the west of the Ritter Range lies the canyon of the North Fork of the San Joaquin, a relatively remote and less visited high-country area. The southern part of the wilderness contains the 3,000 feet deep canyon of the main San Joaquin River, which flows out of the Sierra Nevada to California’s Central Valley.
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