Sunday 5/19
Valley of Fire, NV – Kaibab, AZ
As part of the proverbial trip planning process, we dropped pins on google maps. These pins were to be points of interest, aggregated from personal experience, friendly suggestion, and any number of pinterest road trip lists. We figured any day we weren’t sure what to do, or where to sleep, we would consult this map. At this point we have no idea how or why the majority of these places got pinned. Valley of Fire State Park was one such place, picked it off the map for sleeping convenience between Death Val and Grand Can. We woke up on a little dirt road outside the park, early enough to give the Fire a drive through before heading out. We stayed all day.
The most important lesson of this trip is that America consists of rocks, and that many of those rocks are buck nutty. Valley of Fire contains a number of these nut buckers. There are rocks shaped like honey combs. There are rocks shaped like elephants. There are rocks shaped like short stack of pancakes with a side of overhard eggs. There are pieces of wood so long buried that they’ve turned into rocks. There are huge arches framing rock horizons where the sun is always setting in cut vein reds and longhorn oranges and only Wednesday pinks. There are rocks covered in beautiful petroglyphs that prompt daydreams of Everett Ruessing it, climbing off into some crevasse and figuring it out. There are endless peak and valley waves of rock where the earth has periodically decided to turn everything that’s left of a hundred million years 45 degrees towards the sky to ask you if anything up there could ever blow your mind like this. It’s a cool place.
We ate canned fish for lunch and talked about Who Dat Boi.
Van-ish 