We Smoked the Valley of Fire

Mark a win in the Peacock column. We camped and hiked in the Valley of Fire, Nevada's first state park, with great success.

It is only 50 miles away from Vegas, but what a world of difference. The terrain is so varried and it is easy to see why the park got its name. These two photos were taken from the parking lot at the Visitor's Center, standing in the same place facing north and then turning around and facing south.

CRAZY!

So we camped at the Arch Rock Campground,where almost all the spots (except for a few by the bathroom) are surrounded by the red rocks.

We have been interested in starting a new hobby called Geocahing. People who have hand-held GPS devices use them while hiking and then hide a "cache" in a inconspicuous spot for others to find. Typically the cache is a container that is durable and water-tight like a plastic jar, an old ammo box, or maybe as small as an Altoids tin. Inside there is a log book to sign like a guest book, and usually there is a trinket or two, like a toy or coin, that you take and you leave one in return. There is a whole website dedicated to it called Geocaching.com.

Our first geocache search was adventurous, but fruitless. It was located right in our campground with the trail beginning right past the bathrooms.

We quickly found out we would have to go vertical.

We climbed and boulder hopped and realized that when the GPS said we needed to go 300ft, it would be 300ft up. Joe wanted to keep going but I found my life flashing before my eyes and I started to worry about how we were going to get down, so I put the kibosh on the search. We took some cool photos from our perch.

In this one you can see the neighboring campground. Talk about some awesome sunsets.

In this one you can see how random the erosion seems on the sandstone rock formations. These swiss cheese holes are the only ones on a vertical, smooth rock face.

We made it back to our site safe and sound. Joe was successful at making a fire this time.

I made a slight miscalculation on how long the log would last and we ended up ruining our pork chops because the fire died down too low. We had bacon and eggs though, so we cooked the bacon over the fire and decided to try to hard cook the eggs in foil. Um....not th best plan. Eggs explode. Now we know.

Welp, that's it for 10/13/07. We had a good night's rest and we were ready to tackle another day of hiking on Sunday. More on that later.