  We study the region of the QCD phase transition using 2+1 flavors of domain
wall fermions (DWF) and a $16^3 \times 8$ lattice volume with a fifth dimension
of $L_s = 32$. The disconnected light quark chiral susceptibility, quark number
susceptibility and the Polyakov loop suggest a chiral and deconfining crossover
transition lying between 155 and 185 MeV for our choice of quark mass and
lattice spacing. In this region the lattice scale deduced from the Sommer
parameter $r_0$ is $a^{-1} \approx 1.3$ GeV, the pion mass is $\approx 300$ MeV
and the kaon mass is approximately physical. The peak in the chiral
susceptibility implies a pseudo critical temperature $T_c = 171(10)(17)$ MeV
where the first error is associated with determining the peak location and the
second with our unphysical light quark mass and non-zero lattice spacing. The
effects of residual chiral symmetry breaking on the chiral condensate and
disconnected chiral susceptibility are studied using several values of the
valence $L_s$.
