Valley of Fire
So, at long last my winter hiking drought has come to an end. Over the last four years, I’ve come to rely on a late spring trip to the Southwest to tide me over between my summers in Colorado. In fact, last year, I had to cancel my spring trip to SoCal because of a last-minute gig I simply couldn’t turn down. By the time I finally got to Colorado, I was basically bursting at the seams to get on that mountain.
Thankfully, I was able to chisel out a couple weeks to get out to the land of sand and slickrock. The plan is to see some new places and revisit some familiar ones. I started this morning by flying out to Las Vegas and was treated to a beautiful view of the Colorado River, Lake Mead, and the Hoover Dam on my descent. Mom and Dad picked me up at McCarran, and, avoiding the dreaded strip altogether, we found some delightful strip mall Thai for lunch and wasted no time getting out of town.
I didn’t want to lose a single hiking day on this trip, so we decided to check out Valley of Fire State Park on our way up to Hurricane, Utah, our home base for the next week or so. The hiking here was definitely a warm-up, with several short, easy trails, the first of which was the White Domes loop. This 3-mile hike has a ton of variety, crosses both sandy and rocky terrain, offers plenty of opportunities for off-trail slickrock scrambling, and culminates in a beautiful little slot canyon. I enjoyed getting up on a couple large fins and seeing my first of what will surely be many lizards.
The next stop was the Fire Wave, a 1.5-mile out-and-back trip ending on a stunning slickrock wave. By this point, I was already struggling a bit with my desire to push, push, push. I’ve found that there’s a real yin and yang relationship between desert and mountain hiking for me. 14er hikes in particular tend to require a focused plan and a relentless drive to reach the top within a narrow weather window, while so much of the value in desert hiking, particularly in sandstone country, comes from wandering and exploring. So much of my fitness regimen is geared toward the former that it’s always a challenge at first to allow myself to stray from the course and let my more spontaneous and creative side come to the fore (hiking reflects life, life reflects hiking, and so on...).
Finally, we checked out Mouse’s Tank, a very short canyon hike that features beautiful petroglyphs and a freestanding arch. I got my first significant scramble by climbing up and around to see the back of the arch, and now I’m just so stoked to do more. Holy crap this is gonna be an epic couple of weeks!
