This view looking down Golden Canyon shows red and yellow interbedded strata of the Furnace Creek Formation on an unnamed hill (between Golden Canyon and Gower Gulch). The inter-tonguing beds perhaps reflect changing shoreline depositional environments (between terrestrial and lake deposits) within an ancestral intermountain basin in the mid-to-late Pliocene (about 3 million years ago) before the formation of modern Death Valley (Hunt and Mabey, 1966). |