Why Salt?

You may ask, why salt... what’s the deal with that?

When I was in college, I got to spend a lot of time out in the California deserts, and later in Nevada, Utah, and Arizona.  These deserts are part of the Basin and Range geologic province, a set of linear valleys and mountain ranges that generally have a north south orientation that extends into all those states.

For a geologist, of course, the mountains in deserts provide a wonderful view of the rocks and structures of the desert, hinting at geological history and the evolution of organisms preserved in the rocks, without a lot of vegetation to cover them up.  Most interesting to me are salt flats in the basins and valleys.  The Bonneville salt flats in Utah are the best known, and the salt flats in Death Valley (The Devil’s Golf Course) were the ones I visited the most.

Why is this interesting, what does it mean?  The Great Basin was the site of many lakes formed by glacier melt during the Pleistocene period (2.6 million and 11,000 years ago).  As the lakes dried up, they left salt deposits, both from the dissolved salt in the water and salts leached from the rocks.  A lot of the stories of the deserts in the great basin are the stories of salt deposits. They were mined both for salt and for minerals in the salt.  The interesting thing is that, even in places like Death Valley in the summer, there are liquid brines just under the surface of the salt.  The brine evaporation adds salt; then the less salty water sinks, and that brings up new brine to the surface like a water “conveyor belt.”  Looking at the surface you can see cracks and ridges in the salt pan that are around a meter across, and this same process seems to happen in most salt flats. The beauty of the process makes purer salt at the surface.  In central Death Valley these cracks and ridges have sharp edges and can cut into a shoe, making them dangerous to walk on without good hiking boots. The salt flat is called the Devil’s Golf course.

To me the attraction is the way the salt flats, which are dry and appear dead, can have so many things going on below the surface. They are not concerned with you and I; they are nature at work with the machine of the earth bubbling and cooking away.  Awe inspiring and natural, the earth’s energy moving and creating without regard or care about people and mankind. And yet growing and self-preserving in the interface where the earth meets the atmosphere, and the natural magic happens. 

Photo from

https://www.nationalparksblog.com/devils-golf-course-death-valley-national-park/