For those who don’t go to school in the U.S., dead week is that week after the end of classes and before the start of final exams — a.k.a. study-leave. Since there’s no way I could possibly study for 7 days straight, I decided it was time to take another road trip. (yay!) I pinpointed a couple national parks in Utah, and planned out a route from LA to Utah. This time, we drove across 4 states in 4 days, traveling a total of around 1900 miles.

We took off on Friday night, after our last classes of the semester, and headed towards Las Vegas. It was raining lightly and there was even some traffic on the way, but we made it to Vegas a little after midnight. The rest of the night consisted of a quick tour of the Sunset Strip (in the rain), late night Denny’s and some much needed sleep.

Here’s how rainy Vegas look like in at 2am, if you’re wondering.

We woke up the next morning energized (more or less — obviously coffee helped) and ready for the first stop on our trip: Valley of Fire State Park. You’ve probably never heard about the park before, which is not a surprise since Nevada is not quite known for it’s parks. I was skeptical about stopping by the park at first, but since it was only an hour away from Vegas and in the direction towards Utah, we thought: “oh well why don’t we just check it out.” I’m so glad we did.

Look at those fields of orange and red! It looks so unreal but I swear it’s all real. Everything is colored a brilliant red, which resembles flames — hence the name Valley of Fire. It started raining a little when we were touring the park, but the rainwater only darkened the color of the rocks to draw out shades of crimson red. The overall landscape is gorgeous too. Dots of green shrubs are evenly spread out on lands where piles of rocks haven’t taken over. The contrast of red-orange and green paints a vibrant image that is not typically what comes to mind when one thinks about a desert.

That’s my crew for the trip! Many more photos of them to come in my following posts. These boys are literally the best people to road trip with.

Now for the best part: the rocks have caves in them! Some are huge — large enough to fit a few people, while others are tiny little holes. According to my friend who has an interest in geology, the form of the rocks are created by the change in sea levels over millions of years. To think that all of the land we walked across was once underwater is really quite fascinating.

And that’s not it — a short drive deeper into the park and you’ll witness rocks that look like bacon! The different minerals in the rocks produce distinctive stripes of meaty colors that look just like pork belly. We walked around for a bit but was sad to learn that the best view is at the end of a 3 mile hike. Since it started to rain quite heavily and the area is known to have flash floods, we decided it was time to get out of the park.

The drive out was beautiful. The sky turned white and foggy, leaving only blobs of red-orange scattered across the land. Valley of Fire is definitely a place worth revisiting.

Next stop: Zion National Park.

Next blogpost will be up tomorrow, I promise!

 

xx

– vivian