Our first taste of Riding in the Valley of Fire was with our Riding buddies Alan Gillman and Elisabeth Schmitz-Burchartz. We drove to a trailhead in the town of Logandale. The sign off of the main road just says Logandale Trails.
I'll address some options on where you can park and camp in this Blog entry and another on where we stayed (which we like much better). Follow that road to the railroad trails and follow to the right. This is the only part that is hard to follow because of poor signage. I actually had to back up the first time in and get corrected.
You'll follow this road up a few miles. along the way, you'll see several large turnout areas. One word of caution though. While off road vehicles and ATV's, sand buggies, motorcycles , etc are not allowed in the Valley of Fire State Park; The ARE here. Keep that in mind during the weekend and plan accordingly.
We went to the end of the pavement and parked in the middle of a wash.
Peg getting Rita ready to ride
Lulu waiting to take off on another adventure!
When we started this ride the area of the wash was very fine sand and deep so this is why we parked where we did. the one thing that was really evident was the amount of use this area gets with off road vehicles.
We set off down the road. Peg and I had no idea of what we were about to find or see. The area reminded me of a big dry river bed.
In no time though Alan found a challenge for all of us. We were going to start climbing through the rocks on our mules and Elisabeth's Welsh pony. it was near verticle and pretty tough going through the rocks. It was a good test to see how we would handle the rest of the Valley of Fire and see how our mounts would do.
When we got to the top, We realized that there was a big flat desert scene awaiting us.This place was cool and Peg was having lots of fun! The dogs were too, This area looked void of Cholla Cactus so they were allowed to come along.
The landscape in the Valley of Fire area reminds me of an outerspace movie . In fact, several movies and TV shows were filmed in the area.
Bandit the Camo Dog
And Rita , The Rock Crawler Camo Mule!
Alan, Elisabeth and Peg having fun after crawling up another rock face.
There aren't any real trails for you to follow so if you go, you'll need a strong sense of Direction and or a GPS to get you back to your trailer. There are many dead end trails because of large impassable rocks or steep drop-offs. Be prepared for that and give yourself plenty of time to make your return trip.
We're headed to one of those dead ends now and so we decided to have lunch here.
Are We there Yet?
As good a lunch spot as any…
Going down…..
It was fun walking on the slick rock on the mules.
this was a pretty steep sand hil we went for a "Kodak moment"
reminds me of "Hidalgo"
Headed home after another great ride with great friends. We were happy to find out all of our ponies could handle Rock Crawling 505 too! Onto another adventure….
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