Artist's Drive and Palette
Artist's Drive rises up to the top of an alluvial fan fed by a deep canyon cut into the Black Mountains. Artist's Palette is on the face of the Black Mountains and is noted for having various colors of rock. These colors are caused by the oxidation of different metals (red, pink and yellow is from iron salts, green is from decomposing tuff-derived mica, and manganese produces the purple).
Called the Artist Drive Formation, the rock unit provides evidence for one of the Death Valley area's most violently explosive volcanic periods. The Miocene-aged formation is made up of cemented gravel, playa deposits, and much volcanic debris, perhaps 5,000 feet (1500 m) thick. Chemical weathering and hydrothermal alteration are also responsible for the variety of colors displayed in the Artist Drive Formation and nearby exposures of the Furnace Creek Formation.
Read more about this topic: Places Of Interest In The Death Valley Area
Famous quotes containing the words artist, drive and/or palette:
“The saddest thing the thinker can say to the artist is this: “So, could you not watch with me one hour?””
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“Expect no trivial truth from me, unless I am on the witness- stand. I will come as near to lying as you can drive a coach and four.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The great God endows His children variously. To some he gives intellect—and they move the earth. To some he allots heart—and the beating pulse of humanity is theirs. But to some He gives only a soul, without intelligence—and these, who never grow up, but remain always His children, are God’s fools, kindly, elemental, simple, as if from His palette the Artist of all had taken one color instead of many.”
—Mary Roberts Rinehart (1876–1958)