Titus Canyon is an amazing drive that requires a high-clearance, preferably 4x4 vehicle, and a day to complete the one-way tour. The entrance road is on public lands in the northern Amargosa Valley just west of the ghost town of Rhyolite, and the town of Beatty.
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In Amargosa Valley: just below the ghost town of Rhyolite, and a few miles west of the town of Beatty, is the entrance road to the world-famous road into Titus Canyon, in Death Valley National Park.
Interpretive sign in Amargosa Valley near Rhyolite and Beatty at the entrance of the Titus Canyon Road.
Entering Death Valley National Park on the one-way Titus Canyon Road near Rhyolite.
Interpretive sign at the beginning of Titus Canyon Road in Amargosa Valley, Nevada.
The long one-way dirt road enters a deep slot canyon in the Grapevine Mountains, where the explorer enters deep Paleozoic metamorphic rocks, worn by milliosn of years of flash flood waters.
The drive takes the visitor down through the core of a mountain range, with vertical cliffs hundreds of feet high.
Death Valley sage (Salvia funerea) clings to Titus Canyon cliffs. This shrub is endemic to the Death Valley region and found nowhere else.
Limestone breccia rock exposures in lower Titus Canyon: Angular fragments and blocks of gray limestone are tightly cemented in a matrix of white calcite. Where ancient Cambrian rocks are broken apart by faulting, heat, and pressure, and then revealed by uplist and erosion. See: http://www.jsjgeology.net/Titus-Canyon.htm and https://calphotos.berkeley.edu/cgi/img_query?seq_num=406810&one=T
Driving through a 500 million-year-old geological deposit with breccia--in the deep core of a mountain range-- that has been folded, broken apart, then revealed by uplift and erosion. A spectaular drive. Be sure to have a high-clearance 4-wheel-drive vehicle. You can rent Jeeps at Furnace Creek in Death Valley National Park: https://www.oasisatdeathvalley.com/plan/farabee-jeep-rentals/
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