Overview

This short hike runs up a gravel wash into a narrow canyon with water-polished walls made of white marble and blue-gray conglomerate rocks. The water-polished conglomerate rocks look like mosaic tiles grouted onto the canyon wall, hence the name of the canyon. The bottom few feet of the canyon is a narrow slot that is only 2-3 feet wide in places, but the canyon generally feels open and airy. The best water-polished marble in the entire canyon is between 0.21 and 0.27 miles from the trailhead. For details of continuing up this geologically interesting canyon to a pour-over, see the Upper Mosaic Canyon Trail.

One-way distance: 0.27 miles. Net elevation gain: 70 ft.

Link to map.

Watch Out

Other than the standard warnings about hiking in the desert, ...the hike is pretty safe, but stay out of the canyon if it is raining or threatens to rain because of flash flood dangers. There are several small scramble-ups in the narrows that are easy to pass, but the rock is water-polished, slick, and covered with dust and gravel, so there is greater than usual risk of slipping.

While hiking, please respect the land and the other people out there, and please try to Leave No Trace of your passage. Also, this is a short hike, so just take what you need of the 10 Essentials.

Trail Guide
Getting to the Trailhead

This hike is located in Death Valley National Park, about 3.5 hours northwest of Las Vegas.

From town, drive out to Death Valley. From the Furnace Creek Visitor Center (Table 1, Site 712), drive north on Highway 190 for 24 miles to Stovepipe Wells (Site 751). Continue west on Highway 190 for another 0.25 miles to Mosaic Canyon Road (Site 750), a graded dirt road just west of the campground road. Turn south (left) onto Mosaic Canyon Road, and drive for 2.3 miles to the end of the road at the edge of the mountains (Site 749). Park here; this is the trailhead.

The Hike

From the trailhead (Table 2, Waypoint 1), hike south and up the wash towards the mouth of canyon. The trail starts at the top of an enormous alluvial fan that stretches all the way to the Stovepipe Wells sand dunes, which you can see in the distance below. Initially, the wash runs between 15-ft-tall alluvial cliffs, with the dark gray and brown cliffs of Tucki Mountain towering above them.

About 0.09 miles from the trailhead, you get past the alluvial cliffs and into bedrock at the mouth of the canyon. At that point, you can see that the rocks at the edge of the wash are white. This is water-polished marble (metamorphosed limestone). The white is exposed on the edges of the wash because it is water polished; above the wash, a thick patina of desert varnish darkens the marble.

The vegetation here is sparse as usual, and dominated by creosote bush. Higher up the canyon, you get into vegetation that is more diverse that includes pygmy cedar, Ephedra, prickly Penstemon, other shrubs, and many little annuals.

Continuing up the canyon for another 0.11 miles, you get to the bottom of the narrows. Here, the east (left) side of the canyon is mostly white, water-polished marble, but the west (right) side is layered: the base layer is marble, but that is overlain by a cobbly conglomerate, which in turn is overlain by more-recent, finer-grained conglomerate alluvial materials.

Scrambling up the winding narrows, the rock is water-sculpted and water-polished, and you can see many examples of the marble and conglomerate mosaic in the walls of the canyon. Here, long ago the bedrock was crushed into small pieces, perhaps as a result of earthquake activity or maybe it was just gravel in the bottom of the wash, and then dissolved limestone filled in the spaces around the rubble and solidified to form solid rock. Later, the wash cut down through the rock, exposing the mosaic appearance. There are places along the edge of the wash where you can see that either the infilling process was not complete or the infill material has eroded away, revealing the 3-dimensional nature of the original rubble.

Near the top of these narrows (Wpt. 2), the canyon bends sharply to the east (left). If you are not going to the Upper Mosaic Canyon pour-over, this is a good place to stop because there is a long section of wide, not-especially-interesting canyon before it gets narrow again.

Rest here in the narrows and relax for a spell, then follow your footprints back down through the narrows to the trailhead.

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