A century ago, this wood and iron tower supported a streetcar that carried precious salt mined from a remote valley in the California desert across the Inyo Mountains. Most recently, this stone stood as a man-made artifact in the Saline Valley, marking the edge of a hiking trail through the sun-drenched wilderness.
But on April 19, a visitor to California's Death Valley National Park destroyed the 113-year-old structure while trying to pull a pickup truck out of the mud, prompting the National Park Service to investigate who was responsible. For damage.
The service's request for information from the public led to dozens of phone calls and messages, a video uploaded to YouTube, and an eventual confession.
A park service update provided Thursday said park visitors took full responsibility for the damage, saying it “occurred when they were stuck deep in the mud and in a desperate situation.”
Video of the incident published by Outside magazine showed a white pickup truck partially submerged in mud and its tires spinning.
The person, who has not been identified by the Park Service, tried to pull the pickup truck out of the mud using the tower as an anchor. Partially degraded by decades of exposure to extreme heat and salt water, the tower toppled and its concrete foundation became unmoored from the desert floor.
Video shows the pickup was eventually rolled up onto another vehicle and removed.
The 200 square miles of salt flats around Badwater Basin in Death Valley National Park, which straddles eastern California and southwestern Nevada, is a harsh environment for most plants and animals, and is made up of delicate crystals that are extremely fragile. There is. It gets crushed easily under your feet.
According to an October 2021 Park Service assessment, the collapsed tower is one of four remaining of the original 20 built to support the streetcar, due to regular flooding from a nearby salt lake. His condition was said to be poor because of this.
It was part of a 13-mile aerial tram built by the Saline Valley Salt Company in 1911 to transport salt from the Saline Valley over the Inyo Mountains to the Owens Valley.
Death Valley National Park Superintendent Mike Reynolds said in a statement about the tower's collapse: “I have hiked along sections of this tramway and am amazed at the tenacity it took to build it.” Stated.
Considered a feat of engineering, the streetcar climbed more than 7,000 feet on vertical slopes of up to 40 degrees. At the time, it was the steepest angle of any streetcar system in the United States, according to the Park Service.
In its 1974 nomination for the National Register of Historic Places, the Park Service stated that to construct the park, horses were used to move 1 million board feet of lumber and 600 tons of iron “over rough, inaccessible, rugged mountain terrain. He said he carried it. The project caused the Saline Valley Salt Company to go bankrupt.
Tram service ceased in 1930. By the time the National Park Service applied for inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places in 1974, much of the building materials had been “carried away,” according to application documents.
“However, many of the towers still stand, some with steel buckets clinging to tight cables high above deep canyons,” the park service said.
The service said a four-tower “stabilization project” was planned before the towers were demolished, which was to be paid for through the Inflation Control Act. It is unclear whether these funds can be used to re-secure the tower.
The Parks Department said it was assessing the damage and “planning what a responsible restoration of the Salt Tram would look like.”
