White Dome area – slot canyon

Our work schedule was modified to help cover for departing rangers. We are working Friday to Monday. That starts our “weekend” a day earlier. (I am having a little trouble thinking of Monday as my Friday. The combination explodes in my brain.) We are on our last planned large trip this week. We drove to Nevada to visit the Valley of Fire state park. It’s a beautiful park with several trails. We walked two of them. The first was the White Dome Area. The trail goes down into a canyon, which gets narrow and becomes a way cool slot canyon. Coming out of the canyon, we climb a hill to get an overview of part of the park. The colors are stunning – reds, pinks, yellows, whites, and even some purples. We hadn’t seen all of these colors in one spot before today.

Rainbow Colors

The next trail was the petroglyph trail. The colors weren’t as stunning, but the petroglyphs were. This was awesome enough that it warranted eating lunch there. Unfortunately, it wasn’t anywhere near lunch time, so I had a snack instead.

After the second hike, we did a brief tour of the visitor center movie and displays. I was pretty tired, and the weather was threatening high winds, so we left to go to our next stop, the Lost City Museum.

Petroglyphs

I had high hopes for this museum, but I was pretty disappointed. The concept is cool. They built a museum on top of an Anasazi Village archaeological site. (Anasazi is Navajo for Enemy, so the PC term these days is “The Ancient Ones”. But that is vague and nobody knows what it refers to.) The museum divided the dig into three sections – one to show what it looked like before the dig, one for what it looked like after the dig, and an “interpretation” of what was there. That was OK. But the rest of the exhibits were a mash-up of ancient artifacts, reconstructions of those artifacts, and modern Indian art. They weren’t clearly delineated and nothing was dated, They had some panels referring to what was present at different geological times, but they seemed to be randomly thrown in where they had empty space.

Lost City Museum

Nevertheless, the museum was on the way to hour hotel, it didn’t cost much, and it provided a nice view of the Anasazi. Some of the reproduction baskets were stunning. The CCC built a fake village outside the museum. The picture shows Danita playing around the fake village. There’s no way either of us could have squeezed ourselves inside any of the Anasazi rooms.

Star Trek Enterprise

Here’s a bonus pic. I took it on the petroglyph trail. It looks to me like the Star Trek Enterprise emerging from the rock. (Stark Trek Generations was filmed at the park.)