Over spring break, 14 Notre Dame civil engineering students, one teaching assistant, and two professors traveled from snowy Northwest Indiana to the hot and arid Southwest to explore Death Valley’s stunning and complex geology. What follows is a student travelogue of their experiences.
We left campus at 4:30 a.m. on March 9th for a flight from Chicago to Las Vegas.
On our first day, we toured the Hoover Dam, descending more than 50 floors to the dam’s tunnels and power plants. Despite being sleep-deprived from a long day of travel, we were awe-struck by the sheer scale of the dam and the power of civil engineering.
We left Vegas the next day and drove to Death Valley National Park, where we would spend the next three days exploring. Our adventures began in the area surrounding Death Valley, examining the relatively recent 10-million-year-old volcanic rocks (that included fresh obsidian!) near Shoshone, NV. We then proceeded to Badwater Basin—the lowest spot in the continental Americas, sitting at about 282 feet below sea level.
We walked out onto the basin’s stark, white, salt flats. Telescope Peak and the snow-capped Panamint mountain range towered above us, and we reeled from the sheer vastness of the landscape. We dared one another to taste the salt. It was like sea salt—but worse.
We did five hikes within the park—Mosaic Canyon, Keane Wonder Mine, Golden Canyon (which ended at Zabriskie Point), Fall Canyon, and Natural Bridge. We made two additional stops at the Mesquite Sand Dunes and Ubehebe Crater to explore.
We all kept field journals during the trip to write down coordinates, sketch rock formations, and record strike and dip measurements with our Brunton compasses—a skill we learned on the trip, essential in determining the orientation of rock layers and deciphering their complex tectonic history.
The Natural Bridge hike brought us into a canyon, where we could view and sketch formations of the metamorphic rock, gneiss, around 1.7-2.5 billion years old—the oldest rocks in Death Valley. On the Keane Wonder Mine hike, we searched near an old gold mine for garnet-bearing samples in the metamorphic rocks, but with little success.
On Thursday, we packed up and left the small town of Beatty, Nevada. We were sad to leave the wild burros that roamed the town.
On our way to Vegas, we stopped at the Valley of Fire State Park, known for its brilliant red-orange sandstone. We hiked the White Domes, Elephant Rock and Mouse’s Tank trails, where we saw petroglyphs created by a culture known as the Basketmakers (2000-1450 years ago) and the Anasazi/Ancient Pueblo group (1500-850 years ago), who once inhabited that land.
After we retuned to Las Vegas, we washed the rental cars, completed a field assignment, and got ready for our flight home.
In the classroom, we had learned about this area’s geology but being able to experience it in the natural world was spectacular.
—Sarah Oliva ’26, Shannon Dorman ’27, Nick May ’26