File:View looking ESE across the south end of Deep Springs Valley to Mount Nunn and Deep Springs Lake (45904498801).jpg

Taken from elevation 1708 m (5605 ft) above Antelope Springs, White Mountains, Inyo County, California.

Gotta remember to zoom out sometimes and appreciate the place these plants call home. It is part of the reason I love to document them -- and vice versa!

Deep Springs Valley is a classic Basin and Range graben - an actively subsiding crustal block bounded by high-angle normal faults. How active is demonstrated by the prominent steep triangular facets on the adjacent mountain face, indicating that vertical displacement along the associated fault is happening much more rapidly than any compensating erosion. (Antelope Springs, in the foreground, is probably associated with the other main bounding fault zone on the near side of the valley.)

At earlier hours of the day, the most recent fault scarp is easily seen in the shadows along the entire base of the Lake Mountains (my informal name for this northeast extension of the Inyo Mountains). The scarp represents 30-40 feet of vertical displacement within the past 500-1500 years, likely from a series of fault ruptures and accompanying earthquakes. Those would have been "big ones." As residual rifting and crustal spreading continues across the Great Basin, these valley blocks continue to slip downward relative to the mountainous "horst" blocks in between.

Deep Springs Valley is somewhat of a "transform" horst-and-graben, being oriented southwest to northeast instead of the more north-to-south direction of most Great Basin valleys. This is because it is also absorbing some of the horizontal movement along faults associated with the San Andreas crustal boundary, including the nearby Furnace Creek Fault.

Deep Springs Lake occupies the lowest part of the valley at right, where (not coincidentally) the highest fault scarps are also found. In the deep canyon behind the lake one can see the contact between the layered Cambrian-Precambrian sedimentary rocks exposed to the right (southwest), and the Jurassic granitoid intrusive rocks to the left (northeast).

The high point at left is Mount Nunn, named after the founder of nearby Deep Springs College, and first named while I was a student there: