Hiking at Lake Mead Recreational Park

Zach and I took a hike on Saturday to a park that is only a few miles down the road. If you haven't heard of Lake Mead, it is the largest reservoir in the USA and contains enough water to flood the entire state of New York with 1 ft. of water (26 million acre ft.). It's HUGE! When flying over the lake you can't help but see it, the length is unbelievable! So we consider ourselves forunate to live so close to one of the entrances. They have a 30 mile paved biking/walking path that Zach commonly goes to in the mornings. One of his times there he saw this canyon and so we made a point to go back so I could see it. Keep in mind, our total hike took 3 hours so we walked several miles just to get to the canyon.


It didn't look like an easy task but we wanted to get down to the canyon bottom and walk around so we found a way down from another area and made our way to the canyon. And went through this HUGE culvert.
I was peering over the edge to see if the smaller canyon on the left connect to the one on the right and fortunately, it did so we started to climb down. (the bike path is across the way)Before we made our way down, down, down, we sat at the top to eat our lunch. It was intimidating how deep the canyon really was. Once we got to the bottom, we started seeing some cool stuff right away. Like this big boulder caught in between the sides.

This is to show how steep the sides are when looking up:

This picture doesn't do justice but the Lord gifted us with seeing some wildlife. We came across Two Big Horned owls! One was in a nest across the way from one watching from a boulder. They didn't flinch by our movement and we made sure not to bother them. It was awesome!

This is to show some of the stuff we had to climb over. Talk about a full body workout! Phew! We were so tired by time we got back to the car.

There used to be water running through the bottom at some point but we don't know any history on it. It is obvious there is still water somewhere below because fresh plantlife and vegetation finds life here, amongst a lot of dead stuff. This is just a cool sight along the way out of the canyon:

We can tell that the water USED to flow out of the canyon and into Lake Mead, except that Lake Mead has lost so much water over the years that we walked all over desert that used to be lake. Sea shells, thousands and thousands of them.With the canyon behind us and sea shells under our feet, this was the view that was before us. A glimpse of the lake along with some beautiful rock structures.

We had a great day together, it was an adventure worth taking!