Salt Creek and the Salt Creek Hills in California

About 30 miles north of Baker, California, on State Route 127, is an unexpected occurrence: a flowing creek. Salt Creek rises in the Silurian Valley to the south, toward Soda Lake, and flows northward into the Amargosa River as the latter makes a hairpin bend into the southern end of Death Valley. Because the area is extremely arid, both Salt Creek and the Amargosa River flow mostly underground.

Except here, where shallow bedrock forces Salt Creek to the surface, where it follows a channel carved into the bedrock. This occurrence of surface water was obviously of extreme importance to wildlife, not to mention human populations. Indeed, Salt Creek was a stop on the Old Spanish Trail, which connected Los Angeles with Santa Fe (now in New Mexico) in the early 19th century.

Although Salt Creek has the occasional huge flood along it, its channel through the bedrock of the Salt Creek Hills nonetheless seems disproportionate to the size of the creek. It seems that at some times in the Pleistocene the Mojave River flowed through here and carved the channel. At present, the Mojave River is also normally dry. It currently ends at Soda Lake south of Baker. However, exceptionally large flows down the Mojave, such as would occur during extremely wet intervals, would cause Soda Lake to overflow northward into the Salt Creek drainage, and the Mojave would then become an active tributary to the Amargosa.

Until recently tamarisk (Tamarix spp.) trees were abundant along Salt Creek through here, as can be seen in some of the 2006 pictures. This tree is an exotic that has become established throughout the arid West. Because it competes with native vegetation, it is a subject of eradication efforts, and Salt Creek was cleared of tamarisk in the 2010s.

This area also holds the remains of some of the earliest Euro-American mining activity in the Mojave. In the early 1860s gold was struck in the Salt Creek Hills about a mile east of Salt Creek, but miners were driven off and killed by the local Paiutes. Amargosa House, said to be the oldest Euro-American building in the Mojave, dates from this era. It survives as a well-defined ruin today.

Mining had resumed by the 1880s, and a stamp mill (whose ruins survive) was even built. Intermittent activity continued till the early 20th century. Open shafts and adits remain from that era; they have been screened off for safety, but they have not been filled in. Instead they have been covered with coarse steel grates. This is to allow bats access, as abandoned mines have become important habitat for bats.