Walk through the Mojave Desert, and you might become exhausted from the desolation and homogeneity of your surroundings. View it from above, and you will instead see a complex landscape formed by a variety of geological processes and carved by a seemingly scarce resource: water.
These Sentinel-2 images depict the Mojave Desert lands within the vicinity of Death Valley National Park. With the hottest temperatures in North America, and at times the world, this landscape would appear to fit its given name, whose origins trace back perhaps in part due to the Donner Party. Not hoping to replicate the horrors of that wagon train, a group of pioneers instead followed a lesser known route that was meant to bring them safely to the far south of the Sierra Nevada. What instead followed was a series of fractures among the party along various forks, until one sub-group, the Bennett-Arcan party, believing to be on a 500 mile shortcut, first entered Death Valley in 1850 on what would be a mistake that cost them months. When they eventually staggered across the precipitous Panamint Range on the other side of the valley after gruesome weeks of thirst and starvation, only a single member—Richard Culverwell—had perished. With one last look at the wretched place, those departing bid “goodbye to the Valley of Death”.
As with many tales in the West, the story was soon conflated to the mythic decimation of the entire wagon train, and the landscape became notorious. Yet the lands that the Bennet-Arcan party would come to associate with death have served as the home of several waves of people across millennia. From those that once lived along the shores of the remnants of massive ice-age lakes of the region thousands of years ago to the Shoshone today, human survival in the driest lands on the continent is something to admire.
As these images show, there is more to the landscape than what is initially apparent. The incredibly steep mountains flanking the desert valleys serve as walls to oncoming clouds, extending offerings of water via slot canyons and braided rivulets to the alluvial plains below. Meanwhile, pinon and mesquite on these slopes provide food and shade and keep dust at bay. Concealed springs, and even oases, are to be found even in the hottest and most desolate of places while rare fish (descendant from the ice age mega lakes) now survive in small ponds throughout Badwater. It took one person’s death to name the land, yet this surprising, beautiful, albeit hot landscape is one that is still very much alive.
Satellite data from ESA’s Copernicus program. CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO.