Our journey today was undefined when we departed from Las Vegas RV Resort. We drove south on Boulder Highway which is a highway as far as width is concerned but the myriad of signals make progress along the road drudgery. After about 10 miles and some frustration about slow progress, we ran out of signals and city and the road became US-93. We continued on 93 to Hoover Dam. The west end of the dam is in Nevada and the east end is in Arizona.
Hoover Dam is 86 years old but it was certainly an amazing engineering project. It was built is a very rocky gorge through which the Colorado River used to run unimpeded. Lake Mead is the artificial lake created by the dam and it looks like a bright blue gem in the midst of colorful Mojave Desert valleys and mountains. We crossed the dam twice before leaving the area and heading along the north shore of Lake Mead on, surprisingly, a road named Northshore Road. We followed it for about 50 miles until we entered Valley of Fire State Park.
Valley of Fire is an amazing area filled with massive spectacular colorful rock formations. There is a visitor center within the park that has tons of interpretive information about how the formations were created where we stopped and got the scoop. The park offers both primitive and RV camp spots but even day visitors will have ample places to hike between the magnificent formations.
We completed our circle back to Las Vegas by driving west from Valley of Fire to I-15 and turning south for about half an hour. Then we turned off on Las Vegas city roads which had the same sort of signal concentration we encountered thia morning when we left town.
The loop through the Hoover Dam area, Lake Mead, Northshore Road and Valley of Fire took us about five hours but the road runs through amazing desert landscapes and is definitely worth the trip.
We got a few pix of this stuff and you can see them if you click here