Pages

Tuesday, November 17, 2015

Slot Canyon in Boulder City?

Much of my interest in geocaching comes from seeing someplace off the beaten path that you wouldn't know about otherwise, and the challenge of finding the "hide." Las Vegas is littered with caches, but most of them are in highly public places and too easy to find. In looking for some interesting potential, we ran across mention of a slot canyon in Boulder City. Really?

We started out on the River Mountain trail which was very well signed. Perhaps too well signed if you were riding a bike or a horse.

This portion of the trail had originally been built by the CCC and featured a number of rock dikes to keep the rain water from flowing down the trail.

We left the River Mountain hiking trail and joined a multi-use trail, keep a close eye out for mountain bikes. There were lots of cars in the parking lot when we started out, but we never saw another person on the trails we used.

There were even a few cairns along the way as if you needed them to stay on the trail!

Much of the trail was fairly wide and seemed to have more boot prints than tire prints or hoof prints although we saw those as well. A chill wind was blowing so the top layer kept going on and off depending on the amount of shelter from the wind.


We got to the "slot" to find that some editorial license had been applied to description. Looked more like a gully at the start.

It never got much more than 6 or 7 feet deep, but it was fairly narrow. Apparently some bikers descend this route although it didn't look like many had been through it recently.

The rock in the "canyon" added interest to the hike. Lots of nice color.

We knew that there would be a pour-over on our way that would be a waterfall if the wash was flowing. It was dry and grippy enough that you could carefully walk down the face of it. In fact, I proved you could walk back up it since the published coordinates for the cache were about 25' from where we finally found it.

All told, a nice couple mile hike, four caches, and occasional views of the remnants of Lake Mead, almost 140 foot below full pool. (The lake is experiencing historic low levels at this time.)

No comments:

Post a Comment