Salt Creek Trail Death Valley

Thankfully, the Park Service has built a nice, long boardwalk here so that visitors can effortlessly observe this unique environment without disturbing it.  Walking around in the alkaline mud would not only ruin the landscape and scar it for years to come but it would also ruin your shoes.

Briny Creek

The aptly named Salt Creek is a small, briny, meandering stream that drains portions of northern Death Valley.  Just east of the parking area, its waters used to drain into a large, ancient inland lake known as Lake Manly that once filled most of Death Valley.  The brininess of this creek (like other small streams and ponds found in Death Valley) comes from the large concentration of minerals that have been carried here from hundreds of miles away.  At Salt Creek, these minerals have been deposited in this low valley for tens of thousands of years.  These are not the clean and fresh waters you might find in other places in the desert.

Pupfish

One of the most surprising things about Salt Creek is that there are fish living in its waters.  And there are lots of them.  These pupfish, as they are called, are remnants of a broader species that used to occupy an ancient series of large inland lakes, such as Lake Manly, Lake Tecopa, Mono Lake (near Yosemite) and Owens Lake (near Lone Pine). Today, Mono Lake is the only one left.

Over the past 10-20 thousand years, the climate warmed, the ice age declined, glaciers melted and receded, and the lakes dried up.  This process separated the pupfish and, over time, they evolved into their own different sub-species.  These small holdouts of pupfish can be found today at different water holes stretching from Mono Lake to Death Valley.  They can be different colors and have adapted in different ways to their own unique environments but they are all related to the one pupfish species from over 10,000 years ago.

Of all the small streams and ponds we’ve visited in this region looking for pupfish, Salt Creek has the largest population by far.  The smallest population is in the mysterious Devils Hole, located in eastern Death Valley inside the Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge.  Devils Hole has a particularly unique species of pupfish that has been isolated for a very long time.  The small underwater “world” they live in is only about ten feet in diameter by about fifty feet deep and less than 200 of these fish survive today.

Why are they called pupfish?  Well, the story goes that the first pioneers to encounter them were in route to the California gold fields.  They unexpectedly found some small fish in the brackish, shallow streams that were wildly swimming around.  They darted back and forth and in all directions.  As the pioneers traveled on, they told the story of these strange fish that reminded them of playful puppy dogs and so the name was born.

In reality, the pupfish are swimming wildly because they are spawning.  Just like in so many other settings in nature, the male fish are fighting off other males to garner the females.  The pioneers passed by these waters in winter which is around the time when the pupfish were spawning (usually in February and March).  If the pioneers had come by in July instead, who knows what name these little fish would have ended up with?

More…