Red Rock Canyon

There are few things better than uninterrupted time with your BFF - unless it's uninterrupted time with your BFF while simultaneously taking in an amazing hike. I was lucky to have that over Easter weekend when Janet and I flew the coop and landed in Vegas. And no, I didn't win big while I was there (alas). Neither of us are big gamblers, at least not in the monetary sense :) ... but we've decided that LV provides a fairly cheap getaway to someplace warm and dry, which for two pastey Michiganders is a welcome respite from the deluge of snow and cold we've had this year. Fact, the kids had a snow day just a week before we left. Snow days in April. Preposterous but true. Give me a blistering-hot desert, please, with a little sunburn on the side.

Last time we went to Las Vegas (has it already been two years?), we went to see the Grand Canyon; this time we stayed local and took a day trip to Red Rock Canyon for an amazing day of hiking and scrambling. Maybe not as spectacular as the Grand Canyon, but the climbing is way more accessible, at least for a midwesterner. It was like a playground of boulders. Beautiful, easy, non-technical, thoroughly do-able - but still pretty thrilling.

We started out attempting the White Rock/La Madre Spring trail, a four-hour loop. It looked like this:

It was cool and all, but the view from that particular trail didn't hold a match to some of the rock formations we'd seen a couple miles to the southeast, an area called Calico Hills. So we bailed on the loop and hightailed it to Calico 1 and 2.

The Calicos are much more suited to thrill-seekers, and we saw quite a few climbers ascending some of the sheer rockfaces nearby. It didn't look quite as benign as Planet Rock, I can assure you.

We busied ourselves happily scrambling and climbing over some of the "smaller" boulders, which ranged in size from a refrigerator to a two-car garage. Awesomeness all around. Here's what it looked like:

There were also some funky desert flowers blooming, including this Indian Paintbrush:

All this was just the shot in the arm we needed to go back and face a few more weeks of cold and damp until spring comes.