Leave What You Find.
5. Minimize Campfire Impacts.
6. Respect Wildlife.
7. Be Considerate of Other Visitors.
The Southwest is famous for brilliant sunsets.
Rock Rock Canyon National Conservation Area
Looking toward the Calico Hills in Red Rock Canyon. Yucca, Joshua trees, and creosote coexist in this natural landscape.
Visitors to Southern Nevada are often surprised and delighted to learn that just outside one of the most bustling cities in the world, they can easily experience such a dramatically different landscape as Red Rock Canyon. Only seventeen miles west of the teeming and intentionally artificial Las Vegas Strip is a stunning display of natural beauty, offering pockets of solitude to those who seek it. If you don’t live here or are a newcomer, not yet familiar with how lovely the outdoor West can be, Red Rock Canyon is where you should start to find out.
Tucked into the eastern edge of the Spring Mountain Range, this is a land of red sandstone and gray limestone formations, amid open landscapes, narrow canyons, mountains, and springs. The park gets about six to ten inches of moisture a year although nearby Las Vegas usually gets only three to four inches. The canyon is moist enough to host eight major plant communities, which support a generous variety of wildlife.
Here are more than six hundred varieties of plants and three hundred of animals. Look for desert bighorn sheep in the rocky and steep terrain, mule deer in the foothills and even burros as you travel along the lower-elevation trails and roads. Gray foxes, coyotes, mountain lions, and desert tortoises also live here.
Fragile and non-renewable evidence of American Indian occupation, in both historic and prehistoric times, has been protected here. There are wonderful examples of agave-roasting pits, petroglyphs, and pictographs.
October through April is the best time to hit the trails. Summer’s high temperatures can be unbearable unless you start (and finish) the trail first thing in the morning. There are no services in the park, but gasoline, convenience stores, and restaurants are available on West Charleston Boulevard, less than half an hour from the park’s entrance.
In 1990 the area was officially designated Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area; administered by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), the park contains close to two hundred thousand acres.
The BLM has designated the park’s thirteen-mile, paved, one-way scenic drive as a Backcountry Byway, recognizing its unusual level of beauty and interest. Most of the trailheads mentioned in this book are located along the byway, and are reserved for day use, which means the hours change according to the season. In October “day use” means 6 a.m.–7 p.m.; November-February, 6 a.m–5 p.m.; March, 6 a.m.–7 p.m.; April–September, 6 a.m.–8 p.m. The Red Rock Canyon Visitor Center is generally open 8 a.m.–4:30 p.m. daily. For visitor information: (702) 515-5350, or www.redrockcanyonlv.org.
Directions: From Las Vegas take Charleston Boulevard (Nevada Route 159) west. From its intersection with CC 215 (Las Vegas Beltway), continue west 5.8 miles and turn right for entrance station and Red Rock Canyon Visitor Center.
1 Calico Basin—Red Spring Interpretive Trail
Calico Basin offers a mixed grill of the Red Rock area’s best, including riparian habitat, meadows, springs, and even some cultural resources, all within the area’s signature Aztec sandstone landscape.
An easy way to taste it all is to take the Red Spring Interpretive Trail, which starts directly behind the picnic area. This will take you up a small rise and to the grassy bench above. From here the trail makes a one-half-mile loop around the perimeter of the meadow. This trail is accessible for wheelchairs and baby strollers.
A boardwalk was installed in 2005 as part of a restoration project to protect the environmentally sensitive areas. This way, visitors can still enjoy the area without disturbing the fragile plant life. Outside the boardwalk there is a fence to keep burros and horses from trampling these areas.
Calico Basin; A boardwalk was installed in 2005 to protect the Red Spring surroundings from being trampled.
As you travel along the boardwalk, stop and read the interpretive signs. Be sure and take time to sit quietly a while on one of the many benches along the way, listening and looking for wildlife. Because of a permanent supply of water, lush vegetation, and surrounding canyons, many animals thrive here. More than one hundred species of birds have been recorded, and the area is also home to mountain lions, kit foxes, coyotes, rabbits, ground squirrels, desert tortoises, and ringtail cats. I even had the good fortune of seeing a gray fox on one early-morning visit.
There are three springs in this vicinity. Ash Spring, Calico Spring and Red Spring provided reliable and vital water sources to humans for thousands of years. American Indians used this area and were followed by homesteaders and ranchers. As you make your way around the walkway and over to the sandstone cliffs, keep an eye out for rock art. There are two types in Red Rock Canyon, petroglyphs and pictographs. Here you will be seeing petroglyphs which have been pecked into the surface of rock, unlike pictographs, which were painted on the surface. Some of this rock art is thought to be more than five thousand years old.
Once you reach the far end of the boardwalk from where you started, you will see the waters of Red Spring itself, flowing from a small tunnel or cave. If you look carefully you will see many water-loving plants such as the stream orchid, watercress, Nevada blue-eyed grass and black-creeper sedge. The boardwalk protects not only these plants but also local inhabitants such as red-spotted toads and Pacific chorus frogs.
A few biologically sensitive species also call this area home. The Spring Mountain springsnail, Pyrgulopsis deaconi, is found only in four springs, all of them nearby. The alkali Mariposa lily, which grows in the surrounding riparian meadow, is found only in a few other places in Southern California and Nevada. The largest population in Nevada is said to be the one here.
If you visited this area before the boardwalk was installed, you might remember being able to drive almost up to the base of Red Spring, and park there. As you travel along the boardwalk it’s worth a look in that area to see how it has been transformed. The old road has been covered over and replaced with native vegetation. It’s on its way to restoration as original habitat.
Although this is an excellent place to go when your time is constrained, there are hiking trails just outside of the boardwalk area that are well worth exploring when you have more leisure. There is also a picnic area, with restrooms.
Calico
