We had grand plans that started in 2019 – Baja in 2020! Fishing, camping on the beach, tacos, cervezas. Then a little pandemic came along. We started thinking backup plans. Three weeks off and where to go? November limits options to points south. The southwest it was – Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, here we come. This is the story of 23 days and over 4000 miles on the road.
Since I feel like I have to address it: for those of you thinking…. ‘you can’t travel, it’s too risky’…. consider the fact that we go to work every day in an office, coming into contact with all sorts of people, service over health has been the priority around here. Now three weeks on the road only going indoors once a week or so for groceries seems like a pretty safe proposition. Ok, that’s all I am going to say about that.
We headed south out of Oregon on a Friday afternoon barely in front of a snow storm. The snowstorm caught us overnight in our camp south of Battle Mountain, and quietly dumped about 4 inches on us, the only foul weather of the trip it turned out.
We quickly dusted ourselves off and headed down the extraterrestrial highway. Did you ever notice cows are happier in Nevada that the sullen cows of other states (at least on the signs)?
By the mid point of day two we reached Valley of Fire State Park. The snow from the previous night arrived here as rain. It turned out to be the only real precipitation we experienced in 23 days on the road, and the timing couldn’t have been any better. We arrived to the park seeing the signs of ‘campgrounds full’ which was a bit of a letdown after two days of driving, with this as our first planned stop. As we inched through the campground (we never believe the full sign because in our experience it is only accurate about 14% of the time) a couple flagged us down hollering “we have kids, you can have our site” as if that explained it all, and in fact it did. They hurriedly stuffed their soaked tent into their car and headed back to Vegas, and we backed in to our site, popped the top and settled in for the next two days, happy we could still explore Valley of Fire.
The next morning we set out to see the sights. Not having been here before we hit some of the more popular and accessible sites to get a feel for the park. The sandstone did not dissapoint.
We took several of the short hikes to see the sights, and also spotted some wildlife along the way.
We also came across some historic graffiti.
I’d like to get back to Valley of Fire. For a relatively small park it seemed like we barely scratched the surface.
It would have been nice to linger and do a few long hikes, but they will have to go on the list for next time. We have a few other states to see on this journey to the southwest. Looking ahead, to the Kaibab plateau looked a little ominous, with dark clouds and snow on the peaks. Will the North Rim be in the cards?
