May 20 -- Valley of Fire, part 1

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Here is a link to the interactive expedition map.


This is the breakfast room in the hotel in Overton (NV).  It is a pleasant hotel with nice art and friendly hosts.

I did some time-consuming doctoring of the above.  The exposure to show that upper part of the palm tree, and to show what was outside the windows at the bottom -- totally different.  If one was visible, the other ... wasn't.  So I cut the window below out of the one of the shots that exposed the land across the street from the hotel reasonably, and then applied that bit to one of the shots exposed for what things looked like inside the hotel.



Loading up so we could head out.  I think this is the same sort of palm as the one just outside the breakfast room.

We had hoped to visit the Wave, but you need reservations, and we didn't win the reservation lottery.

Friends had visited Valley of Fire (Nevada) State Park earlier this year, and it has similar rock formations.  Our first night's accommodations were chosen because they were close to Valley of Fire.



I took a lot of pics through the windows of a moving car.  Of course there is glare, and dirt on the windows, and blurry trees getting in the way of my intended shot.  But I am often rewarded with surprisingly decent images.  And now that the incremental cost of taking LOTS of pics is basically nil, well -- why not?

The landscape is not homogenous.  We saw lots of rocks in this sort of shape, but not plain gray ones....

There are flat places, but the flat places we saw had tall stuff at the edges.

I think this next pic is inside Valley of Fire, which is rather large, and has multiple places to get out and hike.

Note sand.  This "sand" is so fine it is almost like dust.  It sifts into your shoes, and leaves your white socks with iron stains.  Walking on dry sand is a lot harder than walking on a surface that doesn't move away from your foot when you exert pressure on it (as you do when you are walking).

This looked very turquoise to the naked eye.  If I lived here, I would learn what all the rocks are.

It had been a wet spring.  Things were a lot greener than they were going to be in a few weeks, and a lot of plants were blooming.

We saw little lizards pretty much everywhere we went.  Most of them were probably less than 8" long, including tail.  I think this one is a desert iguana.

We took one hike that was about a mile long, and another that was shorter.  This is part of the longer one.  You can see the path at the bottom -- footprints in sand....

I believe that the small black rocks spread on the red rock ground are a natural phenomenon.....

Red.  More, and less.

We saw a few lizards as big as this one.

Maybe a foot long?  And a lot heftier than that one above.  I suspect this is not another desert iguana.

More of those little black rocks, strewn across the red.

Another blooming plant.  I believe this is not the same kind as the one above.  More petals, and a darker yellow.

Here is a link to the next post about the Grand Canyon Expedition.

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