Exploring Lake Mead On Our Own

When the last time you tuned into the "Wonderful adventures of us", we had just said goodbye to our good friends Jim, Barb and Daisy. They left Government Wash to start their trek to Alaska. We left Government Wash and headed to Stewart's point on Lake Mead.

This was our spot right on the lake. Totally free camping by the way. The lake is probably 50-60 feet below our camper. Lake Mead is very low. In fact according to our GPS we were camping in water. The lake is 145 feet below it's highest point and 91 feet below an average year. 

Echo Bay

We drove into Echo Bay. It was one of the resort areas on the lake. It was pretty sad. The hotel/restaurant was boarded up. There were 3 camp grounds that were nearly empty. The marina is closed. The entire marina is just sitting on the bottom of what used to be water there. There is a boat launch but it is about a mile out into the lake now.

You can see where the water used to be from this photo. It is just amazing.

Enough about that now. We wanted to stay in this area to visit the Valley of Fire. It is a Nevada State Park and is known for it's red rocks which are actually ancient sand dunes.

As hard as we try, the pictures just don't bring out the vivid colors that we saw with our eyes. The formations where beautiful. There are also many petroglyphs scattered throughout the park. Ancient Native American drawings.

Another area we wanted to check out was called the Fire Wave.

It was very neat. I thought maybe they should change the name to bacon strips to get more people to visit them. Because everybody loves bacon. After our day in the Valley of Fire, we went home to a beautiful sunset and anther great night on Lake Mead. When we were in Government Wash we heard coyotes every night. We haven't heard any hear but there are wild donkeys. You can hear them braying from across the lake. It was so quiet here that it was almost deafening.

The next day we drove back to a red rock formation we had passed on our way here. Lisa likes to scramble around on the rocks.

Lisa scrambling

I dug out my super sexy hat for the day

We a found a new friend. 

A Horned Toad or as I like to call them Horny toads

We found a couple of Jeep roads. We only went down them a short distance because we hadn't planned to explore roads and were unprepared without a full tank of gas. So the next time we will have to travel down them to the ends. One road we did find some wild horses.

The dark spots are horses, trust me, there were three.

That was another full day. So we went home to relax because it was our last night on Lake Mead.

Moose and Journey enjoying the view

I enticed one seagull with some pretzels and before you knew it there where a dozen

We said goodbye to Lake Mead and got a early start to head to Moab, Utah. This state of Utah is so scenic. Even though it was a long drive, the scenery kept it interesting.

There is even snow at the higher elevations. We climbed over 7000 feet twice on the journey. 

We made it to Moab and are anxious to explore many areas here that we have not seen yet. Also having the Jeep will make those explorations much more fun.

So tune in again, Same bat time, same bat channel.