Tuesday, March 17, 2015

Valley Of Fire: White Dome Trail

When we last met, I regaled you with the tale of my adventure with a passel of photographers to capture images during a sunrise at the Valley of Fire State Park in Nevada.

After that adventure, I headed the next boulder over with a carload of Scavengers to hike the White Dome trail.

This trail promised some geocaching (covered in an upcoming post), and some movie history.  Many movies and TV shows were shot in the park, including The Professionals, Star Trek Generations (Kirk died in this park), Airwolf (the helicopter was hidden in the park), a scene from Transformers, and many of the outdoor Mars scenes from Schwarzennegger's Total Recall.

I had never hiked a trail this rugged. It proved to be a bit of a physical challenge, but an absolutely amazing experience.

The first feature of note was this set of stone stairs that lead down into a canyon.
Once we got to the bottom of the stairs, we soon found ourselves walking in this awesome slot canyon.  I have never been in a slot canyon before, so it was quite the experience.
Once we escaped the slot canyon, the trail lead up and opened up to a wide open area.  This shot is looking back towards the canyon.
The variations in the colour of the rocks is absolutely stunning. Pick a colour, and I am sure you can find a rock that matches it.  Case in point:
I was not alone this hike.  With me were three awesome scavengers: Karen and Jeff are pictured here.
And Sivani makes her appearance in this photo (she is also the scavenger from the last photo from the sunrise post).
It was awesome hiking with some photographers as we had 4 sets of eyes scoping out the landscape, pointing out interesting views.  If you have never hiked with photographers, I highly recommend it.
After we returned to the car, we called it a morning (through all this it was still barely 10AM), we had some more excellent views of the aptly named Valley Of Fire.
One last view of the awesomeness of nature.

After this we drove home.  I collapsed into a nap.  However the days adventure was not yet over.  Stay tuned for some more tales from Nevada during The Great Scavenger Hunt Meetup.