11/9 - 11/11 Valley of Fire State Park, Nevada

Last weekend I decided to go to Valley of Fire State Park about 50 miles northeast of Las Vegas. Since it was a three-day weekend, I expected there to be a lot of people, but I didn't expect to have to wait in line for over an hour to get into the park! 

While I was waiting in line to enter the park, I had time to get out of my vehicle and take pictures of the valley. From a distance, it looked a lot like the rocks at Red Rock Canyon.

Once I got into the park, I drove to the Visitor Center and watched people climb in and on the rocks.

Here's that same view from a wider angle. Find the man in the white shirt and dark pants.

Look carefully at the center of this photograph. There is the same man in the white shirt taking a photograph of a woman sitting in a hole in the cliff face. She's wearing a black shirt and black pants.

The road in the park has stunning scenery!

It goes up and down and curves all around! It's hard for me to
 imagine going back to the flat lands of Illinois after spending the past few months in the Amargosa Valley surrounded by mountains like I was here at Valley of Fire!

Valley of Fire is also in the Mojave Desert, so the plants I saw there, like this Silver Cholla were similar to those at Ash Meadows and parts of Death Valley.

This catsclaw acacia was showing its fall colors!

This desert bighorn sheep like the acacia!

There were several hiking trails I wanted to explore, but it was hard to walk several miles in sand and over rocks. Some of the trails were not well-marked.

Although the park staff doesn't like visitors to create rock cairns to mark the trail, visitors still do and I appreciated the ones I saw, like this one.

To me, this rock cairn looked like a little monk meditating over the trail!

Walking helped me appreciate the more subtle scenery along the trail, like the way these plants looked against the red sandstone.

And the colors of these rocks eroded by water running in this valley over many thousands of years.

Valley of Fire has many petroglyphs!

No one really knows what they mean.

They were carved between 1,000 and 4,000 years ago!

I stayed until dark. The campground was full, so I drove out of the park hoping to find a campground near Lake Mead.

I found a place about 5 miles outside of Valley of Fire where other trailers were parked on a big flat expanse of gravel. It was a wonderful place to spend the night! The next day, the sunrise was spectacular!