March 15/16/17; Pahrump, NV; Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area
On Sunday, we decided to just hang out at the campground for most of the day. We’d driven so many miles the day before that we were pretty well done with driving into Death Valley from Pahrump. We’d made plans to meet up later in the day with some of our neighbors from home, Carol and Don Woodward, who were at another campground in Pahrump. They were traveling with two other couples, arrived on Saturday, and were going to be in the area for about a week. We went to their campground for dinner and were treated to some marinated tri-tip steak. Both the food and the company were tremendous and we wish them all safe travels back home.
On Monday, for our last day in the Pahrump, we took Carol’s advice and drove down to near Las Vegas and visited the Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area. OH MY! The mountains and rock formations there were breathtakingly colorful. In some ways the outcroppings in the Calico Hills reminded us a lot of the rocks in the Garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs. The park had one of the best visitor centers that we’ve ever visited. The park is literally only 20 miles from downtown Las Vegas. In fact, you can see downtown from some of the trails.
There is beautiful 13-mile, one way, scenic loop through the park with a dozen or so pullouts. The loops begins at the visitor center (free entry with our America the Beautiful national parks pass), winds its way past the beautiful Calico Hills, and then past the Spring Mountains until it drops you back out on NV-159. We wanted to make sure that we completed the scenic drive before sundown, so we didn’t stop at every pullout, but we did take one hike. How could we not? We started with a short warmup hike on Petroglyph Wall Trail to see, yes, petroglyphs. From there we started up the Lost Creek Trail, only to make a wrong turn onto the SMYC Trail. (We still don’t know what SMYC stands for.) After we realized that we were going south when we should have been going north, we retraced our steps back to where we should have been. The Lost Creek Trail was a loop up to the base of the cliffs that had a short spur up to a waterfall. Of course, we made another wrong turn on the way back to the parking lot, so ended up hiking almost 3 miles on these trails. We really want to come back and hit some of the other beautiful hikes in this park.
If you are EVER in the Las Vegas area, do yourself a favor and take the short drive to this amazing park.
Tuesday was a travel day, but since we weren’t really going all that far, we took our time getting packed up and on the road. Needles, CA, our next stop, was only 158 miles away, but there was construction on the highway as we crossed up over the Spring Mountains AND we got a little bit of snow. Once we arrived in Needles and got set up, we made a run down to the Walmart in Lake Havasu City, NV. I’ve got to tell you that the trip was very depressing. There weren’t very many customers in the store and many of the shelves were stripped bare. There was no toilet paper (of which we’re running low) or paper products, almost no bread, and practically no meat of any kind, including lunchmeat. It began to rain overnight, so Wednesday became a day to do some research about the rest of our trip. To our chagrin, we’ve found that the national park system has started closing down visitor centers at the parks and national monuments. Since the reason for staying at some of our scheduled stops was to visit these parks, we’re finding that these closures are really cutting into our enjoyment of the trip. As a result, we’ve called and cancelled our reservations for the five nights in Cottonwood, AZ (south of Sedona).
LyndDebTravel 