Hello. So today we went out to red rock Canyon.

Red rock Canyon is a national conservation area. It’s a national park and it’s just West of Las Vegas.

It’s only a few minutes, depending on where you’re coming from. Maybe 15 minutes outside of Las Vegas.

Red rock Canyon has a ring road. It’s 30 miles long. You start on one end and it goes all the way to the other end. Along the way there are trail heads, and you can enter those trail heads and go hiking. You can also go use the restroom. Most of the parking areas do have restrooms there. They are overlooks. There’s a link down below for all this information and the trail heads and the map.

This is a great way to experience the park whether you’re hiking, you’re driving or you’re riding your bike.

There are five trails outside of the park. One of them is red Springs boardwalk. This is a beautiful area. What’s nice about it is that it has a big parking area. It has a picnic area. It has restrooms. It has this boardwalk that is really different than any other area of the park. And it goes up to the salt grass meadow.

This is handicap accessible, and if you keep your eye out, you might find maybe some foxes or some rabbits. I saw some a couple of weeks ago and it was really fun.

This is a great place to take high school pictures. I’ve seen people do high school pictures, wedding pictures, quinceanera pictures, all kinds of scenic pictures. With COVID we actually saw people doing senior pictures there. So it was kind of nice to see everybody enjoying the meadow.

So it’s a beautiful conservation area. It’s the national park. You can access it with the national park pass, with the red rock pass. From November through may you do need to make a reservation online in order to go to the park. And you may say, well, why do I need to make a reservation to go to a national park? Because red rock Canyon is one of the top five places in the US to go climbing, to go rock climbing. It’s really fantastic. You don’t have to be a rock climber. You don’t have to be an expert hiker to enjoy it. They have a 13-mile drive that you can drive it, or you can walk it, or you can ride a bicycle. And it’s beautiful.

Along the way, there are places to stop and either start hiking or just take pictures or just admire the view. It’s absolutely phenomenal. It’s beautiful.

This is Aztec sandstone. It dates back to the Jurassic periods about 180 to 190 million years ago. It runs all the way from the Dakotas down to Mexico and West towards Los Angeles. So it’s a vast area of sandstone that we have in the US, but this national park is a great example of the sandstone. Lots of hiking trails here. They have, when you go into the visitor center, or when you purchase your ticket to go into the park, they give you a map. And the map has fantastic information about the park, about the trails, the length of the trails. This is a great place to see what it’s like in the Mojave Desert, right? Because we are in the Mojave Desert.

So we have things like big horn sheep, and we have all kinds of different birds. We have of course, desert tortoises. We have foxes, we have all kinds of wildlife. So keep an eye out, drive slowly on the loop road and take a look at the wildlife. It’s really fun.

So there are different types of hiking trails. So they have anything from easy to moderate to difficult. The easy hiking trails are basically almost flat with very little elevation. The moderate hiking trails have some elevation. So maybe up to about a 400 feet of elevation change, and they range in how long they are. So there may be a couple miles long.

Calico Hills is one of these trails. It has multiple access points and parking areas. It’s two to six miles long, depending on where you start. And it takes about one and a half to three and a half hours. The elevation gain is 400 feet. This trail offers access to sport climbing areas and the best closeup view of the Calico Hills.

Turtlehead peak is one of the hikes that has a higher degree of difficulty. It’s accessible from sandstone quarry, just like Calico Tanks. This trail is five miles long, about three and a half to four and a half hours. And about 2000 feet of elevation gain.

Calico Tanks is probably one of most popular trails out there. It’s accessible from sandstone quarry. It’s two and a half miles about two hours, and about 450 feet of elevation gain. This is one of the most popular trails since it offers sweeping views of the Las Vegas Valley as your reward for making it to the top of the trail.

Icebox Canyon is one of the most popular trails. And it’s also one of the difficult trails. It’s about 2.6 miles, about two hours and 300 feet of elevation gain. It’s likely

that it’s popular because it gives you the opportunity to do some bolder scrambling. And depending on the recent precipitation, you may be rewarded with a waterfall at the end of the trail.

There are six easy trails at red rock Canyon. Two of them are Willow spring loop and lost Creek children’s discovery. These are easy trails. Lost Creek is about three quarters of a mile. It takes about an hour and the Willow spring loop takes about an hour and a quarter. It’s about a mile and a half. They both have pictographs for you to discover, and there are Agave roasting pits.

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