Valley of Fire: Nevada's Oldest State Park

At certain hours, usually just after sunrise or in the last light before sunset, the sandstone at Valley of Fire turns a color that does not exist in the standard vocabulary for red. It goes past scarlet into something that looks more like heat than color, the stone appearing to glow from inside.

Nevada designated this landscape as its first state park in nineteen thirty-five, which means the state was protecting it before most people in the country had ever heard of Las Vegas. The formations are Aztec Sandstone, the same geological material as Red Rock Canyon, but exposed here by different erosion patterns: wind and water working on stratified layers at different angles, producing shapes that look architectural, like structures built by an intelligence operating at geological speed.

The park's petroglyphs are concentrated at two sites called Atlatl Rock and Mouse's Tank. They were made by peoples who passed through this canyon system roughly two thousand years ago, pecking images into the sandstone surface with harder stone tools. The images include human figures, animals, and geometric patterns whose specific meanings are not established in the scholarly record. They are in the canyon because someone put them there, and the person who did is not available to explain.

The name comes from the color. Park administrators in nineteen thirty-five looked at the red formations in low light and called it Valley of Fire. The name is accurate enough that no one has proposed changing it in ninety years.

Fifty-five miles northeast of Las Vegas on Interstate Fifteen and State Route one sixty-nine. It is an hour from the Strip and feels like a different planet.