Southern Nevada Thanksgiving 2021

My company forced all employees to take the entire week of Thanksgiving off this year. I was in the mood for some adventure, so I booked a WMC trip to southern Nevada, where I was hoping that the climate would be more agreeable than at home.

At one point I had 13 people signed up for the trip, but in the end, just 6 of us went. Only Bob and I went on all of the activities; other folks were present for different parts of the trip. It was fun to have a changing roster — new people and new conversation!

Hong and Gretchen wanted to follow me to the camp site, to avoid getting lost. I arranged for us to meet at the gas pumps at the Costco in St George. I was impressed to see a woman pumping gas while wearing a black down vest and beanie over her pastel green drop-waisted FLDS dress.

I had visited Mesquite in October and noted that there was construction on the I-15 bridge over the Virgin River just outside Beaver Dam AZ. On Saturday 11/20, we passed miles of northbound traffic backed up at the bridge; it made us very determined to avoid the bridge on Sunday 11/28 after Thanksgiving.

The road into Gold Butte National Monument between Bunkerville and Whitney Pocket is nominally paved, but the pavement so worn and full of potholes that dirt might have been better. The chip-seal is so eroded that the ancient pavement patches now protrude like traffic-calming bumps. It took us about an hour to drive the 21 miles into Whitney Pocket.

To my surprise, most of the camping loops around Whitney Pocket have now been furnished with port-a-potties. There were a fair number of people camped there; we found a loop that was occupied on one side of the port-a-potty, and we took the other side. The ground was mostly flat, with good dirt for tent stakes, and fantastic views of the sunrise and sunset. Around Thanksgiving, the sun rises at 6:15 AM PST and sets at 4:35 PM PST; we agreed to keep Utah time because dusk at 4:30 was just too hard to deal with. I brought my Coleman gas lantern and it was very useful for our evening get-togethers.

Speaking of evening get-togethers, the running joke of the trip was the bottle of Stella Rosa wine that Gretchen had bought on sale. Gretchen brought it out that evening, and to her dismay, she discovered that the wine was (a) only 5% ABV, (b) sparkling red, and (c) quite sweet. She shopped it around the table and no one could stand more than a taste. After that point, I kept expecting that Gretchen (or someone, anyone) would just pour it out on the sand and put it out of its misery, but instead it kept popping up at dinner times to surprise unwary newcomers. At one point I found the half-filled bottle in my own dining kit... Bob couldn't bear to dump the bottle, and it went home with him.

My 4Runner served as a 4WD bus on the trip. On Sunday morning, I hauled our group on a complicated route over rutted, sandy and rocky back roads to the upper end of the Nickel Creek gorge. Nickel Creek drains the scenic, cliffy basin on the north side of the Virgin Peak crest south of Bunkerville and Mesquite. It has a narrow gorge in its upper section that cuts through some pretty metamorphic rock.

I had visited the bottom end of the gorge back in January 2018 and found that it was too difficult for me to ascend, but it made me curious about the other end. This time, I navigated unsigned dirt tracks by GPS and ended up on a fairly terrible road into Nickel Creek just above the gorge.

The hike started out on a gravelly slope that funneled into the gorge, passing through clumps of narrowleaf cottonwoods, turning gold in the fall. When the streambed crossed onto the metamorphic rock, water came to the surface, first as a trickle and then as a chain of green pools in striped polished stone. Before long, the channel became steep, narrow and slippery, and we decided to turn around.

After returning to the 4Runner, I decided that it would be interesting to walk up the road into the upper basin. I wanted some good photos of the imposing limestone walls above us, but the low sun angle made it tough. The road here is very washed-out and rocky, but the scenery is pretty good.

The rocks in Nickel Creek were full of lovely patterns and crystals. Hong collected some great samples and loaded them into the 4Runner.

go to the Nickel Creek gallery

Our next stop on Sunday was the Falling Man petroglyph site. I had visited the site a couple of times before, but it's packed with rock art and I saw some new panels on this trip, along with many isolated glyphs. We had a blast just wandering around among the sandstone domes and exploring the nooks and crannies.

After spending more than an hour at Falling Man, we went over to the 21 Goats site, which has a fantastic panel with a chain of bighorn sheep [sic].

go to the Falling Man gallery

At dawn on Monday morning, we were roused by a crew who serviced the port-a-potty at our campsite. We were happy that the toilet was clean, a little less happy that we couldn't sleep in.

After breakfast, we went to the Kohta Circus petroglyph site. The trailhead is further down the same bumpy road as Falling Man and 21 Goats, but there is a steep hill and a washout before you reach the parking area. My recollection is that the hill used to have a nasty rut that restricted it to high clearance 4WD, but it appears to have been re-bladed and is now merely terrible rather than awful.

After starting up the sandy trail, it became clear that many people had driven around the signs and barriers that the BLM had erected to keep vehicles out. One set of tracks was so wide, they looked like Humvee tracks, trashing the vegetation on both sides of the former jeep road that we were walking on. Pretty stupid. The tracks stopped where the trail crossed a deep wash.

The trail follows the edge of an area of sandstone domes and canyons. Eventually it turns and drops into a canyon; the Circus panel is on a wall in a little side canyon. The Circus is an amazing, tightly packed assortment of all sorts of animals. Along with the usual bighorns, there are also people, deer, dogs, birds, snakes and tortoises.

Across the canyon from the Circus panel are more gorgeous panels, high up on a wall. We scrambled up as far as we could and got to see some very nice petroglyphs, but the best stuff requires some hairy exposure, so we admired it from a distance.

This is a fun area to explore. Hong and I went downstream through a mini-slot canyon, then went up a narrow joint that continued for a hundred yards or more. Bob and Gretchen checked out another joint system at the top of the draw that the Circus sits in. Using Google Maps, I had scoped out another joint system that looked like it might be an alternative route out of the Circus slickrock area, and we explored that area too, finding a somewhat circuitous route up to the top.

We walked back to the trail along the bases of cliffy sandstone domes, where Gretchen found plenty of agate / chalcedony flakes, discarded from the manufacture of stone tools. The flakes were quite pretty; we left them where we found them.

go to the Kohta Circus gallery

After a break at camp, we took off to visit Little Finland.

On the way there, we stopped at the Devil's Throat, a large sinkhole that formed in early 1900s. The site is a bit of an anticlimax — since the hole keeps getting wider and the edges are very unstable, the fence around the hole has been moved so far away from the edge that you can't actually see into the pit.

It was getting late in the day when we arrived at Little Finland. I had been there once before so I was in on the joke, but I think it didn't sink in for some people until we were on top of the cliff among the bizarre formations. The red light from the setting sun made the red blobs and holes look even stranger.

Cassie arrived that evening. She had originally planned to drive down on Saturday with the rest of us, but work stuff came up and she was delayed. She ended up flying from SLC to St George on Monday and renting a car, then driving the brutal road into Whitney Pocket. That takes real dedication!

go to the Little Finland gallery

I scheduled Tuesday for my big experimental hike to Indian Hills Wash.

Looking at Google satellite photos of Gold Butte, I had noticed a very interesting-looking canyon way down in the southeast corner, crossing into Lake Mead NRA. The canyon appeared to have some spectacular gorges cutting abruptly through tilted layers of rock. It also looked like it was in an area so remote that there was no human imprint on the landscape until you reached the lakeshore. A Google search didn't reveal any trip reports. I worked out an 11-mile round trip route from the nearest road. I was fascinated, and I had to check it out even if the route had obstacles that kept us from reaching the mouth of the canyon.

The hike was interesting enough to Deborah that she made the effort to join us at 6:40 AM Nevada time, leaving from St George and arriving at our camp just after sunrise. There's some more real dedication. Gretchen, on the other hand, left us for the day to hike on her own and then spend the night in Mesquite. (Hot showers!)

We drove from Whitney Pocket south to the Cottonwood Wash road. The road is reasonable inside Gold Butte NM — a bit rocky or sandy in a few places, but bladed and drivable by most vehicles. That changes abruptly when the road reaches the actual Cottonwood Wash and dips into Lake Mead NRA. The last ~3 miles to the trailhead are probably the worst that we drove on the entire trip. There are big boulders, steep hills, ruts and washouts; it's strictly for high clearance 4WD.

The start of the route is a draw that heads east off of Cottonwood Wash. It climbs moderately, then steeply, to the divide with Indian Hills Wash. There is lots of burro poop and many burro trails; the trails, when you can follow them, stay above the catclaw and boulders at the bottom of the draw.

On the other side of the divide, the slope is much gentler. We followed the drainage down through creosote and agave into a valley. The valley opens up again and flows toward a distinct dark wall. That's where the fun starts.

The limestone beds come out of the ground almost vertically here. The wash first punches through a brownish-orange wall, then appears to hit a dead end. At the last moment, it takes a hard swerve to the right and wriggles through impressive vertical beds in a narrows. There's a minor chokestone obstacle in the narrows, easy third class, which we passed without a problem. There are arches everywhere in this section. I think this is the spot where Deborah observed that the barrel cacti that fell from the cliffs and split open looked like durians.

After leaving this narrows, the streamcourse crosses another open area, then reaches a mountainous barrier. The stream runs north for almost a mile along this wall, then turns hard to the right again and enters a lower narrows. The lower narrows is deeper and longer than the upper narrows, and it has more obstacles. The obstacles once again turned out to be fairly straightforward class 3 scrambles.

Eventually we reached a pour-off. I decided that this was a fine place to have lunch and turn back, since I was worried that we could get back to the 4Runner after dark. I really didn't want to thrash through catclaw with headlamps, then drive the awful road in the dark. Deborah found a steep way to scramble around the pour-off and reported that the canyon just kept going. That motivated me to check for myself, and I found a class 2+ ramp on the left that completely avoided the hard part. At this point we were maybe 3/4 of a mile from the lakeshore in a spectacular gorge, and it was very tempting to push on, but I forced myself to turn the group around.

We actually made pretty good time on the way out, in spite of having to climb 2000+ feet, mostly on sand and loose gravel. We met a tarantula crossing the upper wash; Deborah got a fantastic photo. We got down to the 4Runner when there was still some sunlight on the mountain tops, and we made it back to camp while there was still a little light in the sky.

go to the Indian Hills Wash gallery

Deborah and Hong left us on Wednesday morning, so that they could be home for Thanksgiving. The rest of us packed up camp and headed into Mesquite to resupply. We met Gretchen there and convoyed over to the Buffington Pockets.

This area is about 50 miles west of Mesquite, in the northwestern part of the Muddy Mountains. Like Gold Butte, there are many exposures of red and buff Aztec sandstone (Navajo sandstone by another name), and lots of rock art. When we reached the area where I wanted to camp, the wind was brisk and chilly, so I hunted for a more sheltered spot and found one not too far away.

By the time we had set up camp, it was already late afternoon. (The sun went down around 4:30 PM Nevada time!) We still had enough time to walk into the Pockets from camp, however, so I organized a hike. We strolled up the awful road into the Pockets to an old concrete dam (which used to collect water for cattle?). Someone has creatively painted a huge image of an owl on the front of the dam, which makes it stand out. We went around the dam to look for the well-known petroglyph panel a short distance upstream. The panel turned out to be located next to a natural tank (with water!) in a short narrows. I'm not used to seeing petroglyphs in places like that, but I guess the artists had their own reasons for working there.

go to the Buffington Pockets gallery

Thanksgiving Day was dedicated to Valley of Fire State Park. We were camped off of the road to the western entrance to the park, so it was pretty straightforward to drive there.

The visitor center had Thanksgiving hours and didn't open until 10 AM, so we drove over to the Mouse's Tank trail. On the way we saw two bighorn sheep in the cliffs above the visitor center; what fun! I had misremembered the location of the best petroglyphs along the trail, but our detour didn't take long. By the time we returned to the trailhead, the parking lot had mostly filled up.

When we returned to the visitor center, not only had the parking lot mostly filled up, but there were two full busloads of tourists milling around. I tried to get a park brochure, but they were all out. By the time we left, the place was swarming with people; I was very impressed.

I had planned an exploratory hike into Fire Canyon, which is the central drainage of the southern section of the park. By some miracle we found a parking place at Silica Dome. From there, we walked east around the head of the basin on the Silica Dome trail, looking for cairns or other evidence that people had successfully descended through the cliffs. After a while we simply left the trail and wandered south onto the sandstone slabs on the east side of the draw. We contoured fairly high to stay above obvious pour-offs in the drainage, until Bob found a nice class 2+ crack that led down to a cairn in the bottom.

The soft sand in the bottom of the draw made hiking a bit of a slog, and there was plenty of catclaw. On the plus side, the canyon was narrow and colored a gorgeous shade of red. Like Indian Hills Wash, the obstacles were all fairly straightforward class 3. I think we could have easily made it down to where the wash leaves the domes, but we decided to turn around so that we'd have time to visit more of the park.

After returning to the 4Runner, we drove north to the White Domes area. The trailhead is at the end of the paved road, and it was very busy. We somehow managed to find a parking space, and we started hiking. Bob decided to do the class 4 scramble to the top of the dome on the east side of the parking lot, while the rest of us walked the loop around the west dome.

There was a bighorn traffic jam on the way back down to the park entrance. A ranger in a truck flashed his light rack at me, and I pulled to a sudden stop so that a herd of several bighorns could saunter across the road. Very cool — it's nice to see them bouncing back. On the drive back to camp, we passed an incredible number of cars that were still headed to the park, even though it was late in the afternoon. I had no idea that Valley of Fire was now so popular.

Back at camp, I made stovetop turkey tetrazzini as an experiment, using a smoked turkey breast that I had barbecued and frozen the previous week. It worked out very well, but I made so much that I ended up feeding myself, Bob and Cassie, and had enough leftovers for two more meals at home.

go to the Valley of Fire gallery

Cassie departed on Friday morning, leaving just me, Bob and Gretchen. I took our depleted group to two familiar places.

Hidden Valley is a huge bowl surrounded by the Muddy Mountains, with Aztec sandstone that forms walls and floors and domes and monoliths. We accessed it by walking up the outlet stream through a narrow limestone gorge, where monstrous fallen boulders occasionally block progress. The wide expanse of Hidden Valley is a bit of a surprise after the claustrophobic gorge.

In 2018, Nance and I had hiked up the gorge, then crossed the ridge to the north and descended through the Colorock Quarry, making a loop back to the car. This time, our little group spent hours exploring the maze of joints and cracks on the west side of the valley. We found flakes from the manufacturing of stone tools, as well as occasional rock art. The best panel was located in a little alcove along with the skull of a bighorn sheep.

It was very tempting to keep wandering, but we started to run out of water. We crossed the ridge to the Colorock area, where we found more rock art and flakes, not to mention fantastic rock staining reminiscent of wonderstone from Utah.

go to the Hidden Valley gallery

We had a bit of time left in the day, so I suggested that we drive the 30 miles to Arrow Canyon. Arrow Canyon is the defining feature of the Arrow Canyon Range, a rugged chain of peaks that parallels US 93 to the east as it heads north to Caliente and Ely. For some reason, the huge basin of Pahranagat Wash funnels through two narrow canyons in the Arrow Canyon Range to reach the Muddy River to the east. Arrow Canyon is the lower, eastern canyon.

In spite of the fact that I'd shot dozens of photos on an earlier visit, I couldn't resist taking more on this trip. We hiked past some really nice petroglyphs into the lower narrows, which was just as deep and slot-like as I'd remembered. Unlike my previous visit, this time we had plenty of company. The Southern Nevada Climbing Coalition has put up a sign at the trailhead, and the (small) parking area at the end of the (terrible) road was full. (Someone had managed to drive a Toyota Sienna minivan to the end of that road; I was (and am) amazed.)

We found climbers and bolted routes in the lower narrows. I remembered seeing climbers in the upper narrows on my previous visit; the lower narrows are taller and more intimidating, and I wasn't surprised that they are getting climbed. I still love the way that the barrel cacti on the walls defy gravity and stick out perpendicular to the slope.

We returned to camp after dark, sneaking past the “Trump 2020” encampment next to the Buffington Pockets road to reach our little camp. I made grilled ham and cheese sandwiches for dinner. The next morning we packed up and headed home, hoping to beat the traffic back to SLC.

go to the Arrow Canyon gallery