The lower park of Gower Gulch cuts into steeply dipping sedimentary layers of the Furnace Creek Formation. The Artist Drive Formation consists of a mix of conglomerate, sandstone, marls, mudstone, shale, and volcanic tuff beds deposited in a intermountain basin setting during the middle-to-late Tertiary (ranging in age from about 28 to 5 million years ago, spanning the Miocene Epoch into the early Pliocene Epoch) (Hunt and Mabey, 1966, Hunt, 1975; Wright and others, 1999). |