The Death Valley expedition The Death Valley expedition The Death Valley expedition was an 1891 expedition to discover the geographic distributions of plants (phytogeography) and animals in California's Death Valley. It was the first of a series of expeditions funded by an 1890 act of the United States Congress. The expedition included biologists, naturalists, botanists, and zoologists. They produced valuable reports of historic significance in several fields, including ""Botany of the Death Valley Expedition"", "“The Death Valley Expedition: A Biological Survey of Parts of California, Nevada, Arizona, and Utah”", and ""Annotated List of the Reptiles and Batrachians Collected by the Death Valley Expedition in
Death Valley basins down the Owens River Valley through Searles and China Lakes and the Panamint Valley to the immediate west. As the area turned to desert, the water evaporated, leaving the abundance of evaporitic salts such as common sodium salts and borax, which were later exploited during the modern history of the region, primarily 1883 to 1907. Death Valley has a subtropical, hot desert climate (Köppen: "BWh"), with long, extremely hot summers and short, mild winters, as well as little rainfall. As a general rule, lower altitudes tend to have higher temperatures. When the sun heats the ground, that heat is