Photo Sunday - Hiking the Mojave Desert and Red Rock Canyon Outside Las Vegas

Why travel to Las Vegas? To hike through the Mojave desert and scramble through Red Rock Canyon. Why else would you go to Vegas?

A business convention brought me to Las Vegas, but the opportunity to go hiking in the Mojave Desert brought me Las Vegas a day early.

When I got in the taxi cab at the Las Vegas Hilton, the driver a little more than surprised to hear that I wanted to be dropped off in the desert. “Where?” he asked. “I want to be dropped off in the desert a few miles from Red Rock Canyon.” I replied. He immediately consulted his Las Vegas and Surrounding Area map and turning to the last page, a page that was unsoiled and unwrinked and shined in the Vegas sunlight as if the light of day had never seen its ink, drove away.

Hiking through the sage brush and cactus toward the canyon lands, I let the long flight, the uptight two year old who sat next to me and hustle and bustle of airports slide away in the sharp heat. At first I saw nothing but dirt and rocks, mountains and sky, but as my energy slowed to match the warm wind and wonderful sounds of nothingness, I started to notice the life around me.

Never having been here before, I let my eyes be my map and followed my feet towards the large Red Rock cliff face that makes up the National Conservation Area.

The Mojave is home of the Western Side Blotched Lizard, and in some areas they were as numerous as grasshoppers in a summer field of weeds. They were everywhere, but no matter how hard I tried, they eluded my cameras as they squirted quickly between the rocks. The one above though, held still long enough to me to get one decent photo.

Here is a view of Las Vegas that very few tourists (or even locals, according to the taxi drivers) ever see. This is the view of Las Vegas that I like best. As I looked back toward the city, I imagined the thousands of people sitting inside of climate controlled rooms with 24 hour lighting, sliding dollar bills into slot machines.

The grandeur of nature nature makes mans dominion of it, pale in comparison.

The awe and wonder of a billion light bulbs made by men in factories is quickly overshadowed by what our planet offers up to us.

Water, as it flashes and rushes through the canyon and cliffs during flash floods, creates perfects sluices of natural beauty, thousands of years in the making.

But life has a wonderful way of struggling against almost impossible odds. Even in the simply beautiful and chaotic places such as these, a small tree, clutching the ground and inspiring toward the sunlight, brings a moments pause and contemplation.

Simple beauty, I think, can be defined by the narrowness of what is and what is not. In human society, we tend toward excess, imbuing too much upon a thing, complicating a thing and attempting without success to create beauty through the act of over-exaggeration.

Nature however, is not burdened by such things. It doesn’t care what we think and it doesn’t know the meaning of beauty. It is what it is, only because it is only what it needs to be, to nurture its ecosystem. Nature is simple, it is light and dark, soft and hard. Nature is water, air and soil, stripped of all the unnecessary. Nature is this simplicity and that is what draws us to it. It is natures simplicity that we are missing in our lives.

Man can and have made attempts to replicate such simple beauty. Through technology, polymers and Hollywood sets, we’ve created semblances of nature, but they are not made of earth, air and water. They can and never will replace what is right outside of our air conditioned and heated houses, cars and offices. They will always be faux.

As I looked upon the skin of mountain, carved away by the fierceness of water forging its way against and then through the rock, all I could do was sit down in the dust, the hot wind drying the sweat on my brow, and applaud very quietly and slowly, all the things nature is.

As I climbed back up into the desert and pointed my feet toward the city, one thought kept pervading my mind. More than anything, nature shows us what we are not. We are not all powerful. We are not in control. As a human species, we are a fragile thing. Some people don’t like this stony fact, and they rebuke nature, ignore her and attempt to dominate her. At Twilight Earth, we are not those people.

Thank you for visiting our weekly Photo Sunday.