Chasing the Water: Lake Mead National Recreation Area

Nevada and Arizona - Late October to mid-December, 2017

In late October I set up my tent at Boulder Campground in the Lake Mead National Recreation Area. I'd spent a month there the previous January and it felt like I'd never left. It's not that captivating a place but it's pleasant enough. Engulfed by an extensive stand of RVs, I focused instead on the sparse but neatly landscaped desert flora nearer at hand. My site had some willow and cottonwood saplings plus a full-grown eucalyptus, the first two maintained by a subtle little underground irrigation system that came on at odd hours, a sudden gurgling right outside my tent that took some getting used to.

Outside the irrigated perimeter, hardy creosote were thriving in the rock-laden ground typical of the lower Mojave Desert, heavy alluvium remains from past floods of the once wild Colorado River. Tamed now for nearly a century, the river no longer replenishes the soil so the ground has nearly no loose silt or sand. Anything small enough to blow away is long gone, making for tougher (and noisier) walking but a blessing when the wind kicks up. Not many ants either – not enough soil.

Mojave desert floor

This foliage was lovely in early morning light. Creosote in particular has a glow I've grown rather fond of. Creosote might not be the signature plant of the Mojave Desert, that honor goes to the more flamboyant Joshua Tree, but the Joshua Tree grows only at higher, wetter elevations. Down by Lake Mead creosote predominates, clumped up in batches or strung out far apart depending on the amount of available ground water. In much of the lower elevation Mojave, creosote is accompanied only by bursage, leafless in mid-winter, an inconspicuous pile of silver sticks.

creosote

bursage (I think)

Apart from the nighttime howling of coyotes, the campground's preeminent fauna were small troops of Gambel's quail, marching rapidly through the creosote looking with their hood ornaments like Roman Centurions, heads down, eyes peeled on the ground, maintaining what sounds like a lively back-and-forth, amusing in both sight and sound. They travel in families of roughly twelve but sometimes join forces in two or even three bands, forming a veritable battalion – the proper collective being a “covey”. In his 1901 classic The Desert, John Van Dyke said that coveys numbering in the thousands once scurried along the desert.

Gambel's quail are native to the desert southwest but unlike so many native species they are doing well, occupying the “least concern” category for species survival. A park sign says quail populations fluctuate with amount of food. I don't know how they were doing this year but there seemed to be a lot of them and they looked plump to me. Supposedly they eat grasses and cactus fruits, but not in the lower Mojave they don't. Here they must live on creosote seeds. They seemed to patrol the same grounds every day and I wondered what new food might be there that wasn't there the day before. Creosote seeds I suppose

Quail are ground birds and do very little flying. Every now and then one would jump up into a tree for a quick look, or hop onto an unoccupied picnic table. They don't seem to be beggars or raiders and by and large give people a modest berth. They skirted around the edge of my space even if it meant veering up or down the bluff. One might come a little closer and sing something on the order of “hey look at me” but the authorities would always command it back in line. They weren't afraid of human accoutrements; if I was off to the side or in my tent they'd come bobbing and pecking straight through my site.

These quail came in two distinct types. Both had hood ornaments but one was a much deeper brown and sported a more mysterious face, at some angles almost an evil mask. I wasn't sure if this was a male-female or mature-immature distinction but subsequent research revealed it was gender. The young must grow rapidly as very little size differential was evident.

Boulder Campground offers a section with tent pads and good shade but my last time there I was plagued by car headlights deep into the night and car door slamming early in the morning. I find the RV area more amenable even though mine was often the only tent there. The sites have parking pads the size of airport runways and many visitors fill them to overflowing. The RVs themselves have grown gargantuan, built it would seem from the same frame as tour buses, and once stationary they unfold to good sized homes. They are usually towing an SUV, or a boat, or an ORV trailer, sometimes two of the above.

I am not passionately anti-RV. The people are generally nice enough – just like you and me. In general they are older and quieter and go inside after dark, which is why I tend to prefer them to my fellow tenters as neighbors. Generators are getting quieter, and I would much rather hear a generator than loud conversation or car door slamming. These are generalities and there are no guarantees; it always depends on the character of your neighbors. Boulder Campground was much more crowded in November than it had been in January and also warmer, which emboldened older people to stay outside longer, build a fire, camp a little. I would have to deal with noisier neighbors more regularly this time. I typically escape from annoyances I can't bear by changing sites, and I would do so five times in my six weeks at Lake Mead.

I do have deep reservations about RVs ecologically. One guy told me he got five miles per gallon. Five. On the other hand these people are not heating homes in Minnesota so maybe it works out. The National Park Service is apparently in some form of discussion as to how many campgrounds should be upgraded to accommodate these behemoths. My strong inclination would be toward “very few”, keeping park campgrounds more low-key and leaving the enormous RV business to private property outside the park.

As is typical with my opinions, this does not appear to be the direction current national park trends are heading, and when I passed through the park a couple of months later large cement trucks were laying out additional runways in the oldest and what had been the coziest of the Boulder Campground loops. I do wonder how much of the enormous maintenance backlog being used to justify outrageous national park fee hikes are projects meant to maximize RV accommodations.

II
While reasonably quiet at night, Boulder Bay is a noisy place during the day. Hoover Dam is right nearby and the helicopter traffic coming in and out of there can be brutal. The huge RVs make a lot of noise chugging up and down the campground roads. Plus the park campground abuts a large privately-owned RV village, a mix of full-time, seasonal, and transient residents who combine to generate a steady stream of daytime traffic.

So I often fled to the day use area at the beach more or less, where at least three dozen picnic tables are laid out under shelters, with drinking water, flush toilets, garbage bins, parking galore, and relative peace and quiet since I was almost always the only one there. This was largely because these facilities, lakeside less than twenty years ago, were now a half mile from the shore. Lake Mead is shrinking, and a desert beach of rocks, creosote, and bursage is expanding in its place. Desert palms loom lonely. Net-less volleyball poles remain to suggest the fun once had. The lake is still visible and its breeze brought the 65 degree air just to the cusp of chilly where I sat in the shade (picnic shelters, alas, don't do dapple). The spot was just about perfect spot for me, and I spent nearly three entire days there – reading, eating, napping, and pondering my surroundings: alternately forlorn, sublime, and hilarious.

Still plenty of good parking

A somewhat broken-up paved road goes down to the lake and some spend their day there, in the sun or under shade they've brought themselves. I went down there toward sunset to see the glow on the volcanic colors of Fortification Hill across the lake and remained a while to commune with the gulls and coots. Only portable toilets mark the current shore, facilities kept to a minimum in hopes the lake will rise again. Whitish chemical stripes resembling and referred to as bathtub rings rise half-way up the rock walls enclosing the lake, marking the former water level and indicating how much needs to be recovered before these picnic tables will be lakeside again. Most prognosticators say it isn't going to happen.

Fortification Hill

To understand it you have to take a look at The Big Picture, at least a snapshot of The Big Picture, sickeningly familiar I assume for conscious residents of the Southwest but perhaps less familiar to their fellow citizens living outside the lower Colorado watershed.

Lake Mead is the reservoir created by the construction of Hoover Dam. When filled, it is the largest reservoir in the United States. It stores and supplies water for the cities of Arizona, southern California, and southern Nevada as well as for millions of acres of agricultural land. In fact agriculture accounts for roughly three-quarters of all Colorado River water consumption.

Even in the best of times these places had been taking more water than Lake Mead was technically expected to provide, the excess demand met by drawing on water surpluses from Lake Powell further up the Colorado River. But these have not been the best of times, as the Colorado River Basin has been in deep drought since the beginning of the 21st century. Very nearly full as late as 2000, Lake Mead has dropped more or less straight down ever since. At full pool it rises to 1,221.4 feet above sea level. By mid-2016 it was down to 1,0761 feet, the lowest level since it was first filled, and storing less than 40% of its full capacity. Lake Powell, subject to the same drought, no longer has any significant surplus to provide.

In 2017 Lake Mead just barely avoided falling to a level that would have triggered a series of scheduled supply cutbacks. Arizona's share of Colorado River water would have been cut 11.4 percent. Nevada would have lost 4.3 percent of its much smaller share. (California could just rock on.) But without a sudden climate reversal these cutbacks and even deeper ones appear inevitable, and even these are widely viewed as inadequate to address the pending water shortfalls that appear far more likely. The water district of greater Las Vegas is not taking any chances. It just spent over eight hundred million dollars running a pipe to the bottom of Lake Mead to make sure it gets its allocation no matter how low the lake drops.

Of course this is all rise-and-fall-of-civilizations stuff, gigantic agribusiness and unregulated urban growth in a hot dry desert staring into the maw of global warming, all far beyond my piece of work though for the record I will say that Phoenix is either doomed to dry up and blow away or to first become some decidedly non-democratic urban-imperialist center spreading its tentacles to suck up Mississippi and Columbia river water before drying up and blowing away. I've been accused of doomsaying before.

No, my story is limited to the Lake Mead National Recreation Area, whose centerpiece and reason for existence is drastically shrinking. The main problem comes at the edges. Lake Mead is not some big round pool becoming uniformly more shallow, it stretches out for miles upriver into nooks and crannies called bays. Seeking to make the park a boating mecca in the desert, the National Park Service stocked these bays with campgrounds, boat launches, marinas, restaurants, hotels. The lake recedes from these outer bays first, leaving more and more of these facilities high and dry.

Since 2000, the park service has spent over $40 million at Lake Mead to extend roads and boat ramps, build new parking lots, move docks, relocate entire marinas, and make countless other adjustments to the shrinking lake. Three boat launch ramps, three marinas, and at least one hotel have closed entirely. Some of the boat ramps extended early in the drought are already stranded, and most of the remaining ramps are now found at the end of makeshift dirt roads. The park service says it plans to pursue this policy of chasing the water all the way down to 950 feet “to the extent that funding and the physical landscape allow.” But already the place has taken on the look of a civilization half-way gone.

The park has financed this scrambling by selling land and raising fees. In 2011 it raised the entrance fee from $5 to $10 and in 2015 doubled it again, doubling the camping fee to $20 as well. Boating fees are rising even faster. These price hikes are regrettably in line with the other national park units (pending of course the current proposal to jack the entrance fee of twenty parks to $70!), but none of those other parks are experiencing such dramatic reductions in quality. Visitation at Lake Mead peaked at over 10 million in 1995 but dropped like the water to less than seven million in 2014. 

That's s still a lot of people; I was often in a line of four or five cars when I sought to reenter the park. But most of these visitors are not boaters and are largely paying $20 to take a drive through the desert, as the park doesn't really offer a whole lot else for the day visitor beyond picnic overviews of receding waterlines. One attendant told me some visitors are getting testy about the fee, but for now the park seems to be counting on people visiting Las Vegas who figure “hey, what's another $20?”

Meanwhile the desert expands. At last calculation only 13% of Lake Mead NRA is Lake Mead. The rest is Mojave Desert. The park touts desert life in its park video but I've found their promotion of the desert landscape disappointing. In contrast to desert park units such as Death Valley or Organ Pipe, very few interpretive programs and no ranger hikes were on offer for the six weeks I camped at Lake Mead. I spoke to a ranger leading a school group along one trail and she told me that while they were providing group tours nearly every day there was nothing this time of year “for the public.” Now the park gets a rather steady visitation level year round and this November weather was perfect for desert hiking. It seemed like a fine time for public programs. Did the park previously offer such programs but find them poorly attended? Was its budget so stretched by infrastructure demands that it's forsaken its interpretive mission? I don't harass front-line worker with these sorts of questions.

The Visitor Center itself is a hit or miss affair. Like most national park visitor centers, it is staffed largely by volunteers. Some of these people are spectacular. At Capitol Reef two of the volunteers had literally “written the book” on hiking in and around the park. A higher percentage of the volunteers – and God bless 'em all - are limited to the basic information most visitors are looking for, my questions tending to bring forth “how the hell would I know” looks. Lake Mead volunteers were largely in the latter group. One volunteer did come out and identify some plants for me. She said it felt good to go outside. Maybe the park could start with plant identification walks starting from the visitors center.

III

The recreation area has limitless space to hike but few marked trails and hiking is not a big part of the park's agenda. A handout describes eight short to very short hikes. Press a little harder and the Visitor Center will give you specific handouts for other somewhat more ambitious trails, certainly enough to start with.

I started with White Owl Canyon, an unmarked trail barely two miles round trip and a fine place to see white owl excrement and regurgitated rodent fur. It also features a brief patch of legitimate canyon, good for someone looking for an easy taste. I've hiked a good number of canyons, so for me the best part was crossing under the road through an enormous culvert. Fun visuals.

Next I tried the Historic Railroad Trail. Converted from a network of rail lines built to support the construction and maintenance of Hoover Dam, it's wide, flat, level, suitable for bikes, strollers, wheelchairs - not really my kind of hike. But it was nearby, I wanted some exercise, and I hoped maybe it would lead to a closer look at the colors of Fortification Hill. It did not. It did have expansive views out over the lake and its small fleet of pleasure boats, and while I had a hard time getting a photo free of power lines I suspect this does not concern full-time urban desert dwellers craving the visual relief of this small sea of blue. The trailhead parking lot was crowded every day.

Note bathtub rings

The trail goes through five enormous railroad tunnels on its four miles to Hoover Dam. The last mile weaves between transmission towers, utility garages, and fenced off no-trespassing zones of the Bureau of Reclamation. I turned back, knowing that the Hoover Dam Visitor Center charges $15 (most visitor centers charge nothing at all) and would not honor my park pass.

The highlight for me was another sort of anti-landscape, a huge mountain indent I can only describe as impressively ugly. Given that it abuts a rail line dug into the mountain to transport heavy equipment I assume the carnage was to some degree the result of human “disturbance”, though surely erosion and the harshness of climate contributed as well. I cannot read a landscape well enough to tell. The natural history of the declivity would fascinate me, but they don't do that sort of thing here (or too be fair anywhere else).

Historic Railroad Trail

I finally got adventurous enough to drive across the dam into Arizona and hike the White Rock Canyon Trail, a three mile one-way descent to the Black Canyon of the Colorado River. White Rock Canyon is a real canyon, with high walls of brown to maroon volcanics and many whitish granite boulders washed down from the Black Mountains. Alluvial rocks twenty feet up the canyon wall demonstrate just how badly you do not want to be here in flash flood.

White Rock Canyon

White rocks left high in flood water

Black Canyon itself is a stretch of the Colorado River flowing between Hoover Dam and Mohave Lake. It looked like one very slow drift of water to me, though this would vary with the dam's releases. A sandy beach lined the Arizona side; over in Nevada a modest canyon wall rose above the bathtub ring and some clinging mesquite. A half-dozen river floaters gathered a quarter mile down the beach were all that stood between me and total solitude. They were heading for the Arizona Hot Springs, the hike's main attraction. I had assumed I would pass by these hot springs on the return leg of the loop but I found out the trail passes not around but directly through the springs – waist deep - and I wasn't really in the mood for that. I returned on the trail I came in on.

Black Canyon of the Colorado River

My favorite hike was an unmarked trail in an area called the Bowl of Fire, a small part of a highly dramatic stretch of mountains along the North Shore Road. Despite its name, Bowl of Fire is not volcanic but iron-rusted Aztec sandstone, though volcanic rocks litter some of its area, making a stark black on red, terrific when back lit. Unlike at Valley of Fire State Park or the little Redstone Dune trail, the red sandstone at Bowl of Fire is only one of the formations and its mixture in with other formations makes for more subtle variations in color and shape.

A Visitor Center volunteer had offered me a printout for the hike from a non-park website but for some reason I didn't take it. It was more a recommended route than a trail, mostly an off-trail wander, and I figured I could wander on my own. And I did, across sparse creosote-bursage plains, up sandy washes and slopes of broken rock, over and around solid canyon walls. After a half mile or so not even a use trail was evident. A bystander at the Visitors Center had warned me of getting lost out there but it struck me as unlikely. I was never more than a couple of miles from the road and if I wasn't sure where I was I could just climb a hill and see. I even attempted to take a different route back to my car but the wash I chose funneled me straight back to the one I'd come in. It seemed like a place suited for infinite exploration and I planned on returning.

IV - Las Vegas Bay

Boulder Bay was starting to feel too congested and with Thanksgiving weekend coming on I moved about ten miles up-lake to the campground at Las Vegas Bay. This is much more of a desert setting: no adjacent RV Village, far less helicopter traffic. It lacks (so far) the enormous parking pads of Boulder though RVs still have plenty of space and were far and away the dominant vehicle. The campground has a small generator-free loop but I didn't go there for reasons already discussed.

My new site had two desert palms, one eucalyptus, plus several tall plants I didn't recognize. I set my tent amid some creosote out at the campsite edge but the campground host asked me to move back within the border of the irrigated flora. The desert palm rustled like rain in the light wind. The predominate plant, I learned, is oleander, a tall, thick, leafy bush flowering sporadically in both pink and white. The oleander isn't a desert native but doesn't need much water and its density makes for a fine wind break. I guess that was what they were thinking when they planted so many.

Pink oleander

On the down side it's poisonous. A small obscure sign at the information kiosk warned against eating the leaves or the flowers, burning their branches for firewood, or even letting the dog drink from the irrigation water that pools at the plant's base. These are problematic characteristics for a prominent campground plant and the park service has begun to replace them but apparently ran out of funding and in the meantime continues to irrigate them.

My site sat atop a steep slope cut deeply by erosion gullies. The slope itself was sparsely vegetated with creosote and bursage while at the bottom gnarled clumps of dead and dying tamarisk indicated how far up the canyon Las Vegas Bay once extended. The campground host told me the lake had been 40-feet deep just below the downstream end of the campground. Now the bay was not even in sight and I'd have to walk a quarter of a mile before catching a glimpse of it in the distance. Unlike at Boulder Bay, no road has been extended to the water.

But the dried up bay arm was not completely dry. In fact it contained a lusty creek running through a green corridor of lush foliage, a rarity if not an absurdity in the low Mojave. I had seen this anomalous waterway that the map called Las Vegas Wash on earlier visits and even walked along it, wondering what the heck it was doing here in the middle of the desert, but I never looked into it. This time I made it a bit of a research project. And yes, I'm going to tell you about it.

From Las Vegas Campground

Las Vegas Wash

Las Vegas Wash is an anomaly but far from a gratuitous one. In fact it is one of the most attended environmental concerns in southern Nevada (OK, there doesn't seem to be a lot of them). The Las Vegas Wash began as a wash - a fundamental desert landform that channels flash flood waters generated by the occasional thunderstorm. This wash happened to be the sole drainage for the entire 1,600-square-mile basin in which the city of Las Vegas would eventually arise. The wash also received subsurface water emerging from the springs that gave Las Vegas its name, though most of this water sank back into the desert floor. Archaeologists surmise the wash hadn't been a real stream since 14,000 years ago, when the climate was cooler and wetter, and except for floods had been mostly dry for the last three or four thousand years.

Early desert inhabitants gathered around the springs as they gathered around any desert water source, and later Spanish and American settlers either joined them or pushed them aside, all without affecting the basic hydrology. It was not until the middle of the twentieth century that the growing city of Las Vegas began sending enough waste water down the wash to generate a regular flow. By the late 1950s this flow had grown enough for the wash to reach Las Vegas Bay, a distance it hadn't attained in 2500 years.

Of course it was now no longer just a desert wash. It was the Las Vegas Wash, a perennial urban stream sustained primarily by treated urban wastewater and supplemented both by untreated, variably toxic urban runoff plus whatever spring water the underground aquifers might still be yielding. Overwhelming all of this was the mass runoff from the occasional heavy thunderstorm, when the Wash was called upon to serve its primordial function as desert wash. These floods, intensified now by hardened urban surfaces, can generate flows up to 1000 times the Wash's otherwise steady daily average.

While the water quality may have been questionable the stream did foster wetlands that helped decontaminate it and that also provided valuable animal habitat. Thanks to provisions in the Colorado Water Contract, the Las Vegas Wash provided Nevada with “return flow credits”, allowing Las Vegas to deduct the amount of water it was returning to Lake Mead from the amount it was withdrawing, eventually increasing by fifty percent the volume of water it could take from the lake. But the serendipity was not to last. Las Vegas was growing too rapidly and all that wastewater started to become troublesome. The channel flowed at an average of 39 cubic feet per second in 1970; 90 cfs in 1980; and 230 cfs by 2000. These flow volumes eroded the wash, destroyed the wetlands, dumped sediment and chemical pollution into the lake, and undermined the very pipeline that brought Lake Mead water to Las Vegas. In 1999 an enormous flood, estimated at 16,000 to 20,000 cfs, ripped the entire drainage system to shreds.

Action was needed and so a multi-agency brigade responded. Over the next 15 years and counting it constructed a series of over 20 erosion control weirs to slow down the water, decrease erosion, and generate wetlands ponds. Supplemental plantings added to the wash's buffer. 470 acres, including 125 acres of wetlands, have been revegetated, though not all of it survives. The project also removed 1400 acres of tamarisk, not to mention tall whitetop and fivehook bassia, which you can research for extra credit.

And so here it was, the newly revamped Las Vegas Wash, a short steep scramble down from my campsite. The campground plateau has arms extending out between the erosion gullies that then descend like walkways to the canyon bottom. It wasn't glorious but it was an interesting stroll. The canyon walls are made of a tan rock that eroded to a sickly orange where it wasn't collapsing into enormous angular blocks. The canyon bottom that used to be a lake was largely a thick tangle of dead and dying tamarisk. The Wash itself was protected by thick living foliage. But a creek so close to a desert campground was a treat, even if in the early evening air it threw off the distinct aroma of a laundry room – a new twist in the evolution of a desert wash.

not sickly in the warm early morning sun

Las Vegas Wash

My site had expansive views out over the desert and I enjoyed some particularly lovely pre-dawns from the wind shelter of the thick oleander. The dark outline of the Muddy Mountain range stretched along the horizon, a slight pink line running above it giving way to darker and darker blue, the moon and a few stars hanging on. A couple of creosote branches created a silhouette on the horizon line. Dawn took away the mystery and revealed the landscape for what it was – empty, rolling hills almost entirely bereft of vegetation, a uniform dusky brown. Yet several other visitors exclaimed how beautiful it was. I don't know by what standards it would be considered beautiful and I wondered how much they really believed it. The temperature was good. The sky was a clear blue. There were some classic looking mountains along the far horizon. But I sometimes thought they were just being pleasantly conformist. Sometimes I even thought that “It's beautiful” was code for “we're not pathetic losers camped above a drainage ditch outside a dying lake in the Mojave Desert”, but maybe I was just not getting enough sleep.

before

after

These expansive views brought high value to the sites above the cliff top and they filled up even as most of the campground sat empty. A big honkin' thing pulled in right next to me on Thanksgiving eve and its driver set about raising flags and putting up cute lawn signs - “It's five o'clock somewhere” - like they planned on staying a while. I contemplated moving to a less crowded area even though it meant sacrificing my view. Early the next morning the guy came over to my oleander for a chat, undeterred by my bookish absorption. He was a nice guy though. He'd been coming to Lake Mead for a long time and said he used to fish down right below where we were camped. Those days were gone for good he believed, Las Vegas taking too much water his explanation. Just a few weeks earlier I would have agreed with this assessment - the growth, glitter, and proximity of Las Vegas combining to prove guilt. But my recent research indicated the assumption was simply false. The state of Nevada gets only 3% of Lake Mead water and Las Vegas is at the cutting edge of urban water conservation practices (electricity I don't yet know). I spared him an enlightening lecture.

Instead we exchanged MPG facts. I was averaging 43, he was getting five. Five MPG! “Can't hardly go anywhere.” He was older than me but not retired. “Can't afford to.” Neither can I, I joked, but here I am. He owned a business for 22 years but it got too much - “the state wanted this and the state wanted that” so now he worked for someone else. He wasn't out for a long stay, just a long weekend. All the goo-gads just seemed to be the guy's thing. At one point I heard his wife “remind” him that everything he put up he had to take down, and I later saw he'd strung up Christmas lights. He was a working guy with time on his hands. He had been washing his RV windshield just after sunrise and then set about on the details of his jeep. He told me he'd probably wax it later in the day. The fact that I sat there reading while my car was caked in dry mud must have been killing him. Good thing he didn't know it had been that way since I'd driven through high water two months earlier.

I had to excuse myself for the restroom, not a contrivance though I could see by his face he believed otherwise, and I didn't see much more of him. “One of those college boys” I heard him tell his wife, herself a pretty big reader. Too bad, I could have learned some things from him, extracting the true as best I could. Not so bad I bothered approaching him though. I guess I am one of those college boys.

Again I fled to the day use area for some isolation. The picnic area at Las Vegas Bay was set up similarly to that at Boulder Bay but was even more forsaken. The boat launch had closed years ago, the boat ramp remains, sitting high and dry, the lake shore just barely visible in the distance. As usual I was the lone picnicker and I had hidden away in a corner, yet two different drivers stopped and found me in my isolation to ask where the heck they were and how could they get to the lake. They seemed bewildered when I advised them to drive back ten miles to the beach at Boulder Bay. But what about here, Las Vegas Bay? Well if you look closely down into that corner you can see a patch of lake and while I haven't tried it yet I think that a mile or two trek across rubbly desert would probably get you there. This was not what they had in mind. They had just paid $20 to enter a major unit of the national park system and they assumed that there must be somewhere for them to go, and that a sign and a paved road into a complex called Las Vegas Bay must be one of those places. The park could probably be more liberal with some “no lake access” signs.

Bowl of Fire II

Before my next foray into the Bowl of Fire I went back to the Visitors Center for the trail printout I had turned down the first time. The volunteer on duty knew nothing about it. She summoned the full-time ranger who insisted they weren't allowed to send people out to Bowl of Fire because “there's a mine out there.” Now there is also a roadside interpretive sign telling people to ask at the Visitor Center for information on hiking in the Bowl of Fire but I didn't broach that. I really do strive to avoid being antagonistic.

I just found the website, took some notes, and then set out with my memory of those notes. (Why not print out the directions? Filled with photos and GPS locations, they were eight pages long. Why not bring my notes? I wondered that myself.) A half-mile climb up to the shoulder of Northshore Summit brought views down to the Bowl of Fire, out to Muddy Mountains and on either side to what the guidebook called Bitter Spring Valley and the Virgin Basin. I didn't know which was which.

A steep rocky descent to one small wash and then on to another put an end to any views, calling for closer looks at rock formations and dried mud. These led me to Callville Wash, a wide thoroughfare of thick sand where sure enough I encountered a pickup truck roaring toward me. Maintenance guys from the park service, they gave a casual wave as they passed, indicating to me I wasn't somewhere I didn't belong. I did wonder what they were maintaining.

I don't really like hiking in washes though. Footing is difficult, there isn't much to look at, plus they tend to meander. I remembered something in my notes about a steep climb so I climbed steeply atop the wash and found a wide plateau with a view toward a pass with some red rock peaking from behind it. I could cross-country and explore that but that would have meant an all day hike and I felt satisfied with my half-day effort. Clearly my explorations of the Bowl of Fire were unfolding tentatively. On my way back I spotted cairns I had missed as well as a foot trail up to the plateau. I'll be back!

For lunch I drove into Callville Bay, the next developed site to the north after Las Vegas Bay. Its picnic area had the same general setup as Las Vegas and Boulder bays, half the size but just as empty. Water, restrooms, and garbage services were all in order. A decent looking campground was also nearly empty. What looked like a permanent mobile-home community had plenty of residents but they seemed to be laying low at midday. The only action came from a roadrunner taking advantage of the sparse crowds to hop around the picnic area with more abandon than I'd ever seen in a roadrunner in public. Usually they scamper into the brush whenever I approach. This one was more habituated and while it kept its distance for a while it finally seemed to judge me harmless and strolled across the lawn, twisting its neck at a crazy angle to eyeball the tree branches overhead, where a gaggle of unseen ravens was making a ruckus.

Roadrunner

Some twenty-five road miles north of Callville Bay, nearly fifty miles from Boulder Bay, sits Echo Bay, the northernmost set of lake side facilities still in operation along Lake Mead. Overton Beach, ten miles further north, is shut down entirely, even the road is closed, though the park touts some sites there that could conceivably be worth a six mile round trip hike over a dirt road in the Mojave Desert. A mountain bike might be the ticket for that one. Back at Echo Bay I could only find two shaded picnic tables, located alongside the nicely-paved and newly-lined parking lot of a boarded-up, once beach-front hotel. It was nearly engulfed in desert palms and an enormous concrete boat ramp stretched from the hotel halfway to nowhere.

While I was sitting there a maintenance worker came by to test the water at the fish-cleaning station – I tell you, the park service is keeping its part of the bargain - and I went over to find out what she might know. Quite a lot, as she'd been working at Lake Mead for seventeen years. Where had the water been? Right there she said, nearly at our feet. She pointed out the high water mark well up an adjacent cliff to corroborate. The lake had run up around one side of the hotel so that boaters could tie up and come in for drinks. It had been a happening place!

The expanse of missing lake was greater than I'd imagined. I'd like to find out the lost acreage. Even paved extensions to lower lake levels were subsequently abandoned, but the park just keeps chasing the lake. (She's the one I got the phrase from.) One can still drive a dirt road down to a very modest boat dock and a couple dozen boaters had done so, but for a beautiful Saturday morning the activity had to be judged as light. Yet construction supplies on hand appeared to promise future expansion. I spotted the maintenance worker now parked down at the dock, and shortly she boarded a motor boat and puttered out into the lake.

Echo Bay Boat Ramp

Party!

Saturday night of Thanksgiving weekend was extraordinarily quiet. Some coyotes piped up for a while but even they didn't keep it up long, and anyway I love it when coyotes pipe up. Then Sunday morning came a shock to the system. Three women arrived in three separate cars, parked in three different sites, and proceeded to picnic out on the cliff edge near my site, conversing far too loudly for a quiet campground early on Sunday morning. They pitched no tents and showed no signs of camping. Restraining myself from marching out and asking them what the hell was going on, I gradually teased out the story from a variety of sources. They had come to make a video, a tent scene scheduled for daybreak the next morning. An up-and-coming French-Algerian electro-rap duo? - I think that's what one young lady I spoke with said. She was the producer. Other guests/participants would be arriving through the day, they would be having a big picnic that afternoon and camping that night. I moved to the other end of the campground.

I had noticed this was more the anti-social portion of the campground and I was hoping it would stay that way. There was no view but no oleander either so the pets were safer. The park had removed the poisonous plant and planted cottonwood and desert willow but the transition was not going so well. Most of the new plants were sickly or dead and the site had splotches of wet dirt where the irrigation was watering nothing at all. The natives, though, were living large: creosote, an enormous bitterbrush, a mesquite even, the first one I'd seen in a while. Plus a hardwood I learned was a non-native olive tree. There were quite a few of those and I wondered if they were sustaining the quail. Too many cars were driving in and out of the campground, but it was Sunday and I figured they were visitors hoping to find someplace to visit. Maybe even getting lucky and finding a lake. Not here though.

The weather thus far had been quite outstanding; I heard it was Las Vegas's warmest November on record. But I also learned from my new NOAA radio that a strong wind warning was on for the next day so I battened down the hatches, first time I had to do so in months. (Last year by this time I had been savaged by wind several times already.) The morning brought an extraordinary sunrise, too bad I'd surrendered my view. The wind got to rocking about midday and my tent held up fine. But the wind ushered in a change of weather. The unseasonable 80 degrees were giving way to mid-60s, still a bit above average. I had no complaints about the lows in the mid-40s either, here in late-November. The changes did make me focus on the one or two things I still wanted to do at Lake Mead before the weather drove me out.

The main thing I wanted to do was find a way from the campground down to Las Vegas Bay. I set out in late afternoon with the goal of attaining the beach before sunset. The lay of the land led me first to the abandoned boat ramp running down from the picnic area; I could have saved at least half a mile by driving there but I was out for a walk after all. From the boat ramp I made a Pathfinding Discovery: a trail! Not just a use-trail, it was swept clear and precisely lined with rocks. I saw evidence of landscape work as well, piles of gathered brush, presumably a tamarisk removal project. 

No sign marked the trail and I've yet to see any reference to it. I assumed it led to the lake and it did, but it was frustrating in that it kept veering southward parallel to the lake rather than eastward toward it. I realized it was cutting a wide swath around the expanding riparian wetlands of the meandering Las Vegas Wash. I had figured the hike would be about a mile and a half of trailless cross country but it turned out to be almost twice that. It wasn't the most sublime of landscapes. Everything past the boatramp had been lying at the bottom of a lake for 60 years or so before being exposed over the last couple of decades. Some form of ecosystem-in-transition study would be interesting and I hope a university team or two is on that.

It was nearing sunset and I still hadn't reached the bay so I climbed the nearest hill only to find intervening hills blocking my climactic view. Still, the area made for some worthwhile exploring: good rock formations; loads of shells; and a good view down to the mouth of the Wash, an expansive wetland heavily populated by birds including large white ones I took for egrets and even American Pelicans. (My binoculars were in the car.) The long view back up the valley I'd hiked down culminated in the small Frenchman and Sunrise Mountain range. I saw to my chagrin that one leg of the trail climbed up to a paved picnic area called 33-Hole Overlook; I could have driven the entire way, and the next night I did.

The return hike at dusk under a very nearly full moon did offer some sublimity of a decidedly unpicturesque sort.

The next night I followed an easy use-trail down from Thirty-Holes Overlook to the bay. This time I had my binoculars and was able to confirm the presence of a couple dozen American Pelicans, plus some egrets, great blue heron, and tons of gulls, many of which took flight in response to a coyote howl.

As sunset approached I started looking out for the rising moon which I believed would be full, but it was nowhere to be seen. Clouds maybe, though not likely. Kicking around in the meantime yielded an amazing array of landscapes in a small area.

tamarisk and contrails

As it grew to dusk I slowly started back, looking back of course and then suddenly there it was just peeking up over the mountains. I scampered back to the lake shore for some full-moon-rising-over-the-lake pictures. I eschewed the cynical “piles-of-lakeside-garbage-and-full-moon” composition.

When I got back to my campsite a car was parked in the spot right next to mine. Six nights of peace and quiet had come to an end. To begin with, the campground was two-thirds empty so taking the adjacent site violated basic campground etiquette. Plus my arrival set off a barking dog, though a man's voice shut it down quickly enough. The dog would prove to be the least of my worries. I grew to like the dog. If its owner hadn't been such a mess I'd have gone to visit the dog.

The man was solo. He had not pitched a tent. He just took a bunch of stuff from the front seat and piled it up on his roof so he could sleep in his car. Then for much of the evening he sat with his car door open, exuding a succession of frightening noises: deep sighs, sharp moans of pain, and a very problematic bronchial cough. I didn't get a good look at him so I didn't know exactly what I was dealing with. He was just an outline, a flashlight, and a yelling at the dog, who seemed young and lonely, maybe sensing it was tied up in a neighborhood filled with wild canids. The night went better than I'd feared, but I was stressed and began fixating on other demons, like Paul Ryan's plans for the working poor.

In the morning light I could finally see the guy, as decrepit as he sounded though older than I'd feared, excusing some of the decrepitude. He stayed inside the car and opened the door mostly again to yell at his dog. I walked by and waved hi and saw a second dog tied up on the other side of the car. I almost but didn't quite ask him if he was staying another night. If he was staying I was moving. Since he slept in his car it would be a lot more convenient if he moved but that would have been a tough conversation.

I was very aware that I'd been put out by this sorry human being and I did wonder whether I couldn't respond better to this sort of thing, see it maybe as an opportunity for a little compassion rather than an intrusion on my reading. But between the graveyard cough and his meanness to his dogs he seemed like too much of a stretch. I changed sites, taking my sixth (and last) at Lake Mead.

Quail Finale

At the new site I placed my tent atop a large patch of dirt positively covered in quail prints. I seemed to be occupying their Saturday night dance floor. A bit later they emerged from the brush and seemed genuinely surprised by my tent. I'd say they were put out but that might have been projection. They did act differently. At all of my previous sites they had skirted me and my site. Here they clustered about scouring far more intensely than they had anywhere else. A few went under my car – a first – and some came closer to me than ever before. I took the opportunity to observe their interactions. Several different males chased off one specific male. A male and female inadvertently bumped into one other and both jumped back slightly into the air. A male chased away a female. A male intentionally gave a female a soft head-bop. Two males squared off head-to-head for a second or two but nothing came of it. I saw that happen twice.

I wondered if maybe they'd recently been fed at this spot. An RV had occupied the site for a week before I moved in. At dinner I confirmed my suspicions to my satisfaction. When I opened my loaf of bread they came running toward me at the sound of the crinkling. They didn't come all the way to my feet like pigeons. They kept some distance but started perusing the ground, hopping about, even climbing up on a nearby rock for an better view. Not finding anything, they didn't beg but just wandered away. In the name of science I intentionally crinkled the paper and once more they advanced with speed. The next day I discovered it wasn't just plastic wrapper, they came running when I rattled my cookware. It had to have been place specific because they never did this in any other spot I camped in, and I had crinkled paper and rattled cookware in five previous sites.

Another flaming red sunrise augured more strong winds and dropping temperatures. November 29^th brought the first cold morning since I left the mountains in mid-October. It wasn't freezing - surely I'd be facing worse soon enough - just tough to operate a pen. I was pleased that I was at 2500' so late in the season, but I knew my days were numbered. Sure enough, more big winds brought in another cold front with forecasts for lows in the mid-30s one night and the high 20s the next. The days were still nice but the early mornings were getting rough. The campground loop was now almost entirely empty. The party seemed to be over. Time to be movin' on to Death Valley.

Camper's warning