LAS VEGAS-   One of the best things about living in the modern age is travel by jet airplane.  In the morning you can be shivering outside an Indiana airport in the two degree below zero air temperature but by afternoon you will be sitting on a rocky pinnacle in the Nevada desert absorbing the heat like a long hibernated lizard.  Jet travel is truly magic.

This week our adventures take us to the sunny climes of Sin City USA, Las Vegas.  For the third consecutive January, fate has somehow managed to deposit Your’s Truly amidst the glitter of that most cosmopolitan city in the desert.  While this year’s trek was work related, my traveling companions and I managed to sneak into the desert for a few hours of clambering over the pinnacles and spires of the Red Rock National Conservation Area, just west of the city.

If you are visiting Las Vegas during the cooler times of the year, Red Rock should be included on your itinerary.   Just ½ hour west of the Strip, the trip makes a quick and easy excursion away from the overkill of the casinos.  Most people won’t visit during summer when temperatures vary between unbearable and unbelievable.  However, the high desert is wonderful in January; especially if you are from Indiana.

After paying our five-dollar entry fee, we stopped in the visitor center and reviewed the usual plethora of pamphlets, displays and obligatory gift shop.  Afterward, we headed out onto the one-way scenic drive through some of the most dramatic landscapes this writer has encountered in a while.

The drive can be crowded with visiting tourists, buses and even suicidal joggers and bicyclists.  While the views were spectacular along the drive, the large hordes of fanny pack clad, instamatic-waving sightseers grew tiresome and we turned down a track the map laughingly called a road.  At the end, after crawling our low-slung rental car down the jeep trail, we parked and began a desert hike.

Desert hiking can be dangerous, but the weather was perfect and we took nothing more than daypacks with a few essentials.  After just a few hundred yards, we found ourselves in an almost pristine wilderness that was so foreign to our Midwestern minds that even the scale of the landscape was overwhelming.

During our hike we decided that the best place to see the world is from on top, so we began climbing off-trail on the lower spine of a spectacular mountain that reached into the clouds.  The climb at first was easy, until both hands and feet came into play.  Soon we were into actual climbing, without the use of the usual safety equipment or common sense.  However, the views were outstanding.

About halfway, I sat down alone on a rocky outcropping to contemplate the view, the world and the unusual thumping in my chest.  My companions continued climbing upward, leaving me on a broad boulder the size of a rock patio jutting out into the thin desert air, several hundred feet above the surrounding basin.

Sitting alone on a desert mountain is a profound experience.  The silence was almost a physical presence, broken only by the occasional moan of wind and a desert thrush singing.  Distance and scale are hard to reconcile; looking from the close-up to the distant is almost dizzying and somehow seems artificial, like a movie set.

Sitting on my perch, the vista included a steep mountain range to the west that reflected broken sunlight off differently colored rock layers that rise like some fancy stone dessert above a sagebrush table.  One hill in particular is absolutely white and red like volcanic peppermint stick as the sun alternately streamed through increasing clouds.  The clouds themselves become bruised and dark, making the purple hills in the background blend and swirl until the horizon is only a guess.

The ground seems burned in every direction by the fierce summer heat.  However, there is plant life.   Most of it is the color and texture of houseplants forgotten on a windowsill for months, while others are simply dried flower bouquets.

Eventually my companions rejoined me and we slipped down to the trailhead and our car.   Judging by the gushing and insightful comments as we stumbled downward, the desert does affect everything including the people who simply move through it.

Unfortunately, Vegas beckons and we slowly dissolve back into the seething masses in the neon jungle.

Oh yes, the strange thumping in my chest.  It turned out to be nothing, but I would like to say Hello to my new friends at University of Nevada Medical Center: the women shouting obscenities at the ceiling of the waiting room and the kindly wino getting sick in flower box.  Also: Jim, I hope they can re-attach that finger.

Map to Red Rocks park

Photo courtesy PDPhoto.org

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