After one last great breakfast at the ‘Coffee Cup Café’ (by
now we had learned to split the order …) we said good-bye to Boulder City. It
was nice to have had the Nevada Inn as our home base for our explorations of
the area, nice to spread out a bit and not pack up every morning again. We
could have stayed a day or two longer, but we wanted to see some different
country still before the last big push north.
As our destination for the night we had chosen Mesquite
because it meant we didn’t have to drive overly far and would have time to
visit the Valley of Fire State Park for the day. Without any trouble we managed
to bypass Las Vegas this time and enter I 15, from which we turned onto the
small road leading to the west entrance of Valley of Fire SP. Slowly we climbed
through the sparsely vegetated landscape. The sky was dark grey over the hills,
which didn’t bode well, but the temperature stayed around +12 or 13, not so
bad, except for the strong wind. Maybe it would push the clouds away, at least.
The landscape didn’t change much for quite a while, but once we had reached the
crest of the hills we entered a totally different world. Even with the few
photos I had seen of the park I couldn’t have expected this! Fantastic rock
formations, dramatic colours, erosion-created rock sculptures – what did the
grey sky matter in the face of such an array of different features? It was
almost overwhelming, driving down into this dazzling tapestry of rock.
Close to the beginning of the park, right after the entrance
fee station, a lot of cars were parked on the side of the road. Curious, we
stopped as well, and here they finally were: the elusive Rocky Mountain Bighorn
Sheep we had searched for in vain several times now in Hemenway Park in Boulder
City, a green space to which they are supposed to come down from the
surrounding hills ‘every night’. We didn’t see them once, and only at our last
stop did Johann read the one qualifier that might explain this: ‘(every night) in
the warmer months …’ But here they were, a group of males, the way it
looked, some of them with very impressive horns. They were marching through and
didn’t linger long to have their picture taken.
Our next stop was the visitor centre, mainly to get some
advice regarding hikes in the park. We found a lot of other information, about
the history of the people in the area (from prehistoric ‘Gypsum People’, to ‘Basket
People’, Anasazi and Paiute), about the geology, but also about flora and
fauna. I finally found out what the strange orange ‘strings’ were that are
wrapped around some plants like a fungus mycelium and that puzzled me already
during previous visits to the southwest. It is not a fungus, but a perennial, a
parasite called ‘Dodder’ which eventually kills its host plant, of course. The
interesting thing, to me, was that it is also fully edible and very high in
beta carotene. Now, I cannot wait to find one to try it.
Since the weather was a bit iffy the ranger’s recommendations
were just right. None of the three hikes he suggested we could do along the
scenic route leading away from the visitor centre to the north for a few miles
was overly long; they were all supposed to take between forty-five minutes and
an hour.
The first one, closest to the visitor centre, was ‘Mouse’s
Trap’. A very sandy path – a characteristic of the whole park, as it turned
out, almost like walking on a beach – led down into a rocky wonderland.
Water,
wind and sun worked together to create amazing sculptures, natural bridges and
other ‘rock art’. Human created rock art was part of this hike as well,
however: a multitude of petroglyphs, well preserved in this narrow canyon where
the sun couldn’t damage them so easily. Sheep-like creatures were abundant, as
were people and tortoises. A sign at the beginning of the hike offered
suggestions as to what the different symbols might mean. The sheep were an
important food source for the prehistoric hunters and gatherers, so it was not
surprising to find many rock etchings of them, but there also were animals with
huge racks that looked like deer, which, with today’s environmental conditions,
is more unlikely. While it’s fun to try and interpret the symbols it doesn’t
really matter what they are. To me the
important thing is the fact that they are there at all, for us to see such a
long time later and to appreciate that even many centuries ago people felt
compelled to do artwork to express themselves.
Moisture must find its way into this valley, because it was
comparatively green. Here, I found again the plant I had seen in Red Rock
Canyon, the flower stalk a lot higher already, and some of them in bloom. I am pretty sure now that it's a member of the buckwheat family.
The next stop on the way took us to the ‘Fire Wave’. The
hike started downhill on a sandy trail and turned to the right along huge
rocks.
By now, we were walking on a hard rock face that looked like a massive
multi-coloured dune. Again the colours were amazing, but totally different than
the first hike. Rock formations here looked a little like huge cakes decorated
with a cookie press, and some reminded me of the swirling pattern in
chocolate-vanilla soft ice cream (maybe I was hungry for something sweet just
then?).
In any case, it was beautiful even under the grey sky, although blue
sky would have presented an even more beautiful backdrop.
The whole hike took
maybe an hour, and there was enough time for the last one on the ranger’s list
of recommendations, the ‘White Rock Loop’ at the end of the scenic drive.
Here, the trail started with a steep descent on a long set
of natural rock stairs ending in a wash. Almost at the bottom we passed the
remnants of a movie set: several movies have been filmed here in the park, among
them the 1965 Western ‘The Professionals’.
Turning to the right in the wash we soon entered a nicely sculpted
short slot canyon; I always, always like those whenever I encounter them, here
as well as in Death Valley or during our hikes in Arizona. It feels as if I’m
passing through something to be given over to whatever awaits me on the other
side, a transformation of sorts. The only transformation here was the changed
territory on the other side, however, when we started our slow ascent towards
the parking lot. We passed through more bizarre rock formations, with a huge
rock wall on the right. The hike, which was supposed to take about 45 minutes
according to the brochure, took us only half an hour.
We probably could have added one more short walk before leaving
the park, but we decided we had had enough. The variety of textures, colours
and formations almost made my head spin, and we were ready to move on and head
for our planned destination for the night, Mesquite, about an hour away at the
most.
We stopped one more time at a sign for ‘Petrified Logs’,
which was a bit of an overstatement because there was only one. That, however,
was an impressive sight: a huge trunk, left over from a time when the area
surrounding the park was home to lush forest, about 225 million years ago. The
pine trunk, it is speculated, was washed away during a flood and ended up here,
where it was completely mineralized after being covered with sand and silt before
being exposed again by erosion.
We exited the park through the eastern gate and took Hwy.
169 through the Moapa valley via Overton before entering I 15 north for the
last 30 miles or so. Mesquite seemed to consist mainly of hotels, restaurants
and, most prominently, casinos, and that was one reason why we had chosen to stay
here: accommodation is extremely cheap. Johann had done some research on the
internet, and, almost at the end of town, we found the ‘Virgin River Casino’ where
we got a room for a mere $30.38 US. If the hopes of the casino administration
were to entice people to spend money gambling and drinking they had miserably
failed with us: we brought our bottle of ‘Burgundy’ to our room and, after a
meal in the restaurant that was way too much for us, were happy to pretend that
casinos didn’t exist in our world.
It is strange to be exposed to an environment one isn’t
familiar with at all. I was stunned at the sheer amount of people who stay
here, at the fact that the hotel consisted of seven, if not eight buildings
that each easily had 150 rooms. The noise and lights in the casino turned me
off completely. To think that people spend whole days in these halls without
ever seeing the daylight, can no longer escape the one-armed bandits, card or
roulette tables is terrible. I was witness to the fallout from this when I
walked to the laundromat: a couple screaming and cursing each other on the
balcony in the adjacent building, the words, ‘F… you! I can’t take this
anymore!’ How many scenes like that play out every day in places like this? Closing
my eyes to this, trying to forget it exists, may be cowardice, but I was glad I
was only passing through.
We had contemplated staying another night if there was any
good hiking in the area: it was supposed to get warmer, and we are not too
eager to return to the wintery north any sooner than we have to. The visit to
the information centre in the morning cured us of that notion, however: the
only ‘hiking’ was on trails in the city itself. We were looking for a different
kind of trail.
Thus we checked out, had breakfast and drove on towards St.
George, Utah, only about an hour’s drive away. There, we hoped we would find
ample opportunity to spend time on trails less groomed and less frequented.
