[Christina] Day 2: Valley of Fire

After a harrowing escape from Las Vegas the previous evening, Elizabeth and I camped at Valley of Fire State Park not far outside of Las Vegas.  However, Nevada was clearly not willing to rest on its annoyance laurels from the previous day.  You see, we were awakened at a tender hour by OHMYGODTHEBEES, at approximately 5 am [Elizabeth sidebar: all the bees really enjoyed poking around pretty much everything, just as the sun was coming up. ]

Did you ever see that terrible movie Jupiter Rising?  The one where Mila Kunis turns out to be the Queen of the Earth or some other such nonsense, gets swarmed by bees, and another character intones, "Bees can sense royalty"?  Yep, it was really that bad.

Anyway, do you know what bees can sense?  Water and sleeping bags.  It was a difficult morning.  Following the advice of a sign in the restrooms, we poured some water out on a metal shelf and it was promptly swarmed.  This took care of many of the bees, but also attracted many, many more, and the particularly inquisitive ones kept investigating us and our stuff.

OMGBEES!!!

Once we wrapped up our morning activities (quickly, quickly, throw everything [but the bees] in the car!) A, we set out for a rock formation appropriately known as the Beehives.  Thankfully, the Beehives had 99% fewer bees. 

Geology time!  The Valley of Fire contains two rock formations.  The first is the Jurassic Aztec Sandstone (the same unit as the Navajo Sandstone on the Colorado Plateau), which is approximately 180 million years old.   It shows large-scale cross-bedding, formed by terrestrial dunes similar to what we find in the Sahara Desert.  The sandstone is bright red and yellow due to iron oxide minerals.

Everybody loves dune cross-bedding!

The second unit is Paleozoic limestones, approximately 500 to 300 million years old, which are gray.  During the Early Cretaceous (145 to 100 million years ago), the area underwent compression from the west and the older limestone was pushed up on top of the younger sandstone.  The fault that resulted is the Muddy Mountains thrust fault. 

That little V of gray rock straight ahead is the limestone.

So, here, we have Paleozoic limestone sitting on top of Jurassic sandstone which is 150-300 million years younger.  Wild!

Also very, very pretty.

There is a much more in-depth discussion of the geology of the Valley of Fire here.

After that, we were happy to escape from Nevada before it could bother us any more.  We took I-15 East through a sliver of Arizona [Elizabeth sidebar: if you ever have a chance to drive this sliver of Arizona I-15, it is full of the most beautiful roadcuts, windy roads, etc. - hard to believe it is an interstate, and oh, so much spectacular geology!] and then into Utah.