A day among rocks - Valley of Fire state park

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.