Today was another gorgeous day at Valley of Fire. The temperatures have been in the low 70's every day and down to the 50's at night. That means very comfortable days and cool nights that are wonderful for sleeping.
We've generally done very well at making sure we have everything we need for our trips. We have developed very extensive checklists through the years that have worked very well for us. But each day of this trip, we find more things that we have forgotten. We had to hurry to get everything ready for this trip, and it shows. We forgot the milk, to re-activate our Verizon MiFi, all of the Valley of Fire printouts of the places I've researched (fortunately, I have the electronic versions along), and Carol's hiking shoes. I'm hoping we will soon stop finding new things we've forgotten.
One of the results of forgetting to activate the MiFi is that we are totally out-of-touch with the real world. We have no cell coverage in our campsite and no Internet connection anywhere. It seems very strange not to know what is happening in the rest of the world for three days, especially at a time when the GOP has shut down the government and is driving us toward defaulting on our debt. If Wall Street goes into freefall, it will take our 401K right down with it.
No MiFi has also reminded us how dependent on technology we have become. We use software, Internet connections, and a GPS to find where the sun/moon rises and sets, and what the terrain looks like in a certain area. Most of the results of my planning are saved in programs like GoogleEarth and TPE. Without an Internet connection, we're flying blind much of the time.
Today, our goal was to find a location to shoot moonrise at sunset. The main road through the park runs directly north and south with tall ridges on both sides of the road. That makes it very tough to find a good moonrise location. Silica Dome is on a ridge along a side road, so we thought it might be a possibility. The area below Silica Dome is called Fire Canyon and was gorgeous, but Silica Dome wasn't a good spot for moonrise. We returned to camp for lunch and still didn't have a good destination for sunset. I poured over the maps again and finally decided we would just shoot sunset and not worry about moonrise.
After getting cleaned up and relaxing for an hour, we decided we would try to find Fire Canyon Arch. The area looked so interesting this morning,
that we thought we'd do some exploring. The arch was relatively close to the road and on a ridge, so we thought we should be able to find it fairly easily.
We ventured down a canyon, but discovered it was a dead end before we found the arch. The slickrock formations in the sandstone were delicate and
extremely fragile in many areas. Tiny cracks were filled with some type of cementing agent that was stronger than the sandstone. In many areas, the sandstone
had eroded and left tiny ridges of the cementing agent behind. We had to be extremely careful where we walked so we wouldn't
damage these delicate sandstone structures.
There were complex flows and patterns in the sandstone everywhere. Small alcoves and arches hid in nearly every ridge.
But we were looking for Fire Canyon Arch, so we walked back out the canyon and were going to try the next canyon to the east.
When we climbed the ridge
, we looked up
to see the moon rising next to Silica Dome. It was perfect timing. The slickrock in the foreground was lit,
and the moon was coming up just to the side of Silica Dome.
We never did find Fire Canyon Arch, but we realized as we drove back to the main road that we were too far east. The road wasn't paved when the guide book was written, and the new turnout was 1/10 of a mile farther east. That led us down the wrong canyon. We'll have to try it again later in the week.
Fire Canyon is an incredible area. The sandstone is very light-colored close to the road, but about 1/2 mile south the light sandstone transitions to a dark red or orange sandstone. The contrast is spectacular. There are places where you can stand on a ridge and have one foot on the tan sandstone and the other on the darker sandstone. Normally in places like Red Rock Canyon near Bryce, a fault line explains the contact zone between the two totally different types of rock. That doesn't seem to be the case here because there is no clean break. There are fingers of the light sandstone that reach into the darker sandstone on several of the ridges. The entire area is a geologist's laboratory. Tomorrow, we're going to spend the day wandering around in one of the interesting areas near our campground.
Previous Day
Return to Trip Page