Valley of Fire -Day 2

Posted At : October 16, 2007 6:12 PM | Posted By : Admin
Related Categories: Valley of Fire

We slept gooooood. No shivvering, no breaking camp at 2AM. It was a good night and we were refreshed in the morning, ready for more Geocaching.

I started off with a small warm up on the rock right in our campsite.

We climbed and climbed and climbed through a rock canyon in our camground to search for the cache called Fire in The Hole. We saw great views and got to skin our knees and bump our heads as we boulder bounded.

As it turns out the cache was right next to the road the whole time and if we had just walked around the campground on the dirt road we would have walked right up to it. But what fun is that?

If we'd walked right up to it we would have missed these fine views and discoveries.

Here we are finding the cache.

It was an old army ammo box with all sorts of junk in it like wooden nickels, and army parachute men. We didn't take any treasures, instead opting for signing the log and putting everything back where we found it.

After successfully finding our first cache we went back to camp, packed up and headed for our next adventure called Mouse's Tank Trail.

The area is filled with tourists because it is such an easy trail and there is so much to see. We encountered busloads (literally, tour buses pulled up and dropped them off) of French tourists. I could tell they were French and not French Canadian by their shoes. They had very European shoes. You know what I mean.

We hiked and climbed on the rocks to avoid all the frogs ("Huhn huhn huhn, I wout lie-ak to gu beck to zee bus now. Eet ees so hot in ze dez-ert.") There are some awesome petroglyphs that the Anasazi left behind back anywhere from 300 BCE to 1160 CE (that is, Before Common Era and Common Era, replacing the old BC and AD which is all tied to Jesus and very imprecise. Let's be more scientific, people).

We successfully found another cache with muggles (non-geocaching people who watch you suspiciously because they can't figure out what you're doing) looking on and making us nervous.

And that concludes the Valley of Fire tour. Thanks for visiting and we hope to see you again.

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We Smoked the Valley of Fire

Posted At : October 14, 2007 8:28 PM | Posted By : Admin
Related Categories: 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.

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