Night Hike at Valley of Fire State Park, Nevada

I’m falling behind, so here are some photos from a nighttime hike along the Rainbow Vista trail to the Fire Canyon overlook in Valley of Fire State Park.

Moonlight on the rocks. iPhone Night mode at work.
The sun sets early in December.
Hoped to do some stargazing, but these clouds came in after the sun went down.

A Distant View of the St. Thomas Ghost Town

An unintentionally spooky-looking photo of the Gentry Hotel in St. Thomas, NV. Source: Photo from the Gladys Gentry Collection, Lost City Museum/Lake Mead NRA Public Affairs. CC BY-SA 2.0.

The town of St. Thomas, Nevada, was settled by Mormons in 1865. On August 31, 1869, John Wesley Powell’s First Colorado River Expedition, which culminated in the first recorded passage by raft through the Grand Canyon, came to an end about twenty miles from here. Bishop Leithead of St. Thomas, informed that Powell had, in fact, survived his expedition, rode to meet him. “Bishop Leithhead,” Powell wrote, “brings in his wagon two or three dozen melons, and many other little luxuries, and we are comfortable once more.”

Only two years later, most of the original settlers left due to a dispute over taxes. Other people later moved in and at its peak, the town had over 500 citizens. When Hoover Dam was built in the 1930s, the government bought out the residents. The last person left in 1938 as the town was inundated by the rising waters of the newly-created Lake Mead.

In wetter times, the site lay under 60 feet of water. As lake levels receded with the ongoing drought of the 21st century, the remains of the town have been exposed again.

The view from St. Thomas Point.

To get to St. Thomas, you turn off of Northshore Road and drive 3.5 miles down a rocky dirt road. There’s a parking area, from which you can head down hill to a 2.5 mile hiking trail. We arrived late on a December afternoon and had someplace else to get to before nightfall, so only had time to view the building foundations from a distance.

Foundations of St. Thomas
The foundations of St. Thomas.
The current (decades-long) drought is not the first time St. Thomas has re-emerged from the water. These two cars were abandoned by their owners when Lake Mead’s waters covered the town of St. Thomas in 1938. They were revealed when the lake receded in 1945. Source: Lake Mead NRA Public Affairs. CC BY-SA 2.0.
Jeep Compass Trailhawk
That trusty Jeep Compass again.

Reference:

John Wesley Powell, 1875. Exploration of the Colorado River of the West and its tributaries. Explored in 1869, 1870, 1871, and 1872, under the direction of the secretary of the Smithsonian institution. Government Printing Office, Washington.

Driving Northshore Road along Lake Mead

Northshore Road runs along, yes, the north shore of Lake Mead. The shoreline itself is now far east of the road because of long-term drought in the region. Coming west from Hoover Dam, we turned onto it near Lake Las Vegas and drove it up to Valley of Fire, stopping several times along the way.

Palm tree and spring
Rogers Spring
Jeep Compass Trailhawk on desert road
Our ride: Jeep Compass Trailhawk, courtesy of National Car Rental

First Visit to Hoover Dam

Hoover Dam

My first visit to Hoover Dam, and it’s incredible to see both how big the dam is and how low the water level is behind the dam. In December of 2021, the water elevation of Lake Mead was 1,065 feet above sea level – almost 200 feet lower than its maximum level, and the lowest level since the 1930s, when the lake basin was still being filled.

lake Mead behind Hoover Dam
Low water level at Lake Mead.
The Mike O’Callaghan–Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge, completed in 2010, is the second-highest bridge in the United States. You can walk across it for a great view of Hoover Dam.
The view from the O’Callaghan-Tillman bridge.

A Field Guide to Concrete Screen Blocks

Identify the different styles of breeze block in those mid-century houses in Vegas, Palm Springs, and elsewhere with this Field Guide produced by the Nevada Preservation Foundation and based on the book by Ron and Barbara Marshall.

Excerpt from the Screen Block Field Activity Guide. Source: Nevada Preservation Foundation
Source: Curbed/John Lewis Marshall

Arthur, Beulah, and Bertha: The Extended Parker Family

Bertha Cody at Gypsum Cave
Source: M.R. Harrington, “Man and Beast in Gypsum Cave.” The Desert Magazine, April 1940.

Discovered another Trowelblazers post with a Lamoka connection, which led me into the interesting and complex family history of Arthur Parker.

Bertha “Birdie” Parker Pallan Thurston Cody  was the daughter of Beulah Tahamont Parker and Arthur Parker, New York State Archaeologist and Rochester Museum director. She had an interesting and complicated  life of her own, working as an archaeologist/anthropologist at the Southwest Museum in Los Angeles, California for many years. That was only part of her life, however.

Hidden Cave Vandalized

Guided Tour of Hidden Cave archaeological site, Nevada. Source: BLM

Spray paint and bullets were used to deface Hidden Cave, a major archaeological site on BLM land in Nevada. A $1,000 reward is being offered, and public tours of the site have been suspended while officials investigate.  According to the official press release, this is the first incidence of vandalism at the site.

Hidden Cave was most extensively excavated by David Hurst Thomas and the American Museum of Natural History and provided valuable information on Late Archaic hunter-gatherers. The Museum has a nice post on the history of the cave, (conditions in the cave during excavation sound horrid) and they also make the full site report freely available.

There’s a Lamoka connection, too: Mark R. Harrington, the first archaeologist to explore Hidden Cave, was married to the sister of Arthur Parker, head of the Rochester Museum while Lamoka Lake was being excavated in the 1920s.