Valley Of Fire State Park, NV (Part One)

 

Valley of Fire is Nevada’s oldest and largest state park, another beautiful area of red rock sandstone formations just 55 miles northeast of Las Vegas and 6 miles from Lake Mead. It reminded us a lot of Red Rock Canyon just west of Vegas where we stayed last week.

We put our $10 admission fee in the envelope and headed for the visitor center to get some information about hiking and to check out the displays. There are numerous short hiking trails, but you are permitted to hike anywhere in the park as long as you stay off the arches.

Our first hike was to Mouse’s Tank, aka the Petroglyph Canyon Trail. The trail ends at a tank with quite a bit of water in it, and all along the trail the rock walls are covered with petroglyphs. They are easy to miss if you don’t look hard. Allegedly a Southern Paiute Indian renegade named Little Mouse hid out there in the 1890s. Not such a bad place to hide!

 Several people told us we should hike from wash #5 to get to an area called Fire Wave. There is actually a marked trail from a parking lot farther down the road from the wash, but this was more fun since we got to walk through a slot canyon along the way.

Climbing up to the Fire Wave. We missed the easy way up.

We guess the name came from the Wave in Arizona, but this is on a much smaller scale, though still impressive.

We had a great surprise ending to our day at Valley of Fire. Stay tuned for part two.