Water is essential to life everywhere you go but in Death Valley it's
extremely important.
Death Valley has some of the driest landscapes on the
planet we've had years without recordable rain and so the reliability
of these springs and access to water is what allows life to exist here at all.
There's a thousand Springs in Death Valley which is really remarkable and
some of which are really productive like the Staninger Spring here that feeds
Scotty's Castle and Grapevine Canyon. This is an amazing place and it's the
reliability of that water on an annual basis that allows life to exist here as we know it.
This part of the park was really hit hard by the flood of October
2015 and we've had destruction mostly to our infrastructure and the things that
we prioritize and value today but the natural world is very resilient and as
you can see as we move down the channel here where the water is expressing when
you just add water there's life and we'll see some of that.
I don't know if you guys can see it or not but on the pipe right here there's
footprints that are walking up and down the trail. They are bobcat footprints.
This is really impressive. Two years ago this was just dirt and gravel and as you
can see the life is coming out of it we've got cattails and new willows
starting and water seeping. I'm sure we've got frogs and damselflies
dragonflies in here.
Diving beetles in the water that are endemic to this area. They don't occur anywhere else
Oh frog
Little tiny Pacific tree frogs they're about the size of a quarter.
They're all over this place.
We got bees and wasps. Grapevine Canyon has a home to at least
240 birds that were aware of that have been documented here it's one of the
highest diversity birding spots in in the whole of the Mojave Desert.
It's truly an amazing area.
So we're in the spring house. This is the main source of water for Scotty's.
This has been the spring collection gallery that was put
in by Johnson early on it's also actually called Staninger Spring.
The building that you see around it is a temporary building that we put in
because the original building was damaged beyond repair in the flood but
this is the main spring source flows about 200 gallons a minute and it's what
gives life to Scotty's Castle is this spring source.
When they built it they had ceramic clay blocks people call them and you can see that the
they've turned on their side and the water penetrates through these ceramic blocks.
This side here was damaged in the flood and blew out the historic
collection system if you will and that's one of our projects is to
rebuild that historically and get all the mud out and clean it up.
Scotty's needed to be closed as a result of the flood. We had no fire suppression system
life safety issues. We had no potable water. We had no wastewater system and we had
no HVAC no climate control systems and therefore it was it was just absolutely
unable to continue tours and and the operation as it was previous to the flood.
The goal of this project is to bring back this iconic
cultural resource to Death Valley to what it was pre flood and beyond if we
can we want to make this the jewel of the northern end of the park we want to
use it as a jumping-off point for people to really learn about Death Valley to be
able to explore the biological, cultural and natural histories that we have here
it's easy access to Ubehebe Crater from here it's on a major route for
people traveling out of Death Valley to the north through Tonopah.
With the consistent reliability of water over eons it's an easy story to tell.
Life finds a way when there's water. This is a remarkable spot to capture people's
attention and hopefully keep their interest in Death Valley and the
Park Service in general.