While Red Rock Canyon certainly makes a tasty appetizer, to experience the true scale and splendor of the Southwestern deserts you need to make the hundred-mile round-trip drive to the Valley of Fire , northeast of Las Vegas. Its multicolored, strangely eroded rocks are the solidified remains of sand dunes laid down at the time of the dinosaurs, 150 million years ago. If they seem familiar, you may have seen them in any number of movies, from One Million Years BC to Star Trek - The Next Generation .

The road into the valley, state Hwy-169, cuts away east from I-15 thirty long, empty miles up its course toward Salt Lake City. Passing briefly through a corner of the desolate Moapa River Indian Reservation, it then starts to undulate and climb the aptly named Muddy Mountains, whose gray-ochre wall forms the eastern boundary of the Dry Lake Valley

Valley of Fire

• Valley of Fire

Explore Valley of Fire

• Lost City Museum
• Northshore Drive
• Valley of Fire State Park

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