Red Rock’s 196,000 acres lie adjacent to another product of the Cretaceous—the stunning Spring Mountains—which I explored the following day. Formed when massive slabs of seabed limestone were thrust on top of one another, the Springs are in many ways a distinct eco-island, complete with locally endemic species. The highest point is the summit of Charleston Peak, just shy of 12,000 feet. Rising from scorching desert, Charleston Peak is blanketed with ponderosa pines and bears snow as late as May. I managed to hike high enough to have some trouble breathing, though the waterfall at trail’s end made me glad I had kept going.
My next target, on day three, was a traveling mountain. Between 5 and 19 million years ago, the Pacific Plate’s northwest movement tugged the North American Plate westward, breaking Frenchman Mountain off the Colorado Plateau, home to the Grand Canyon. The plate interactions hauled the mountain 50 miles west and deposited it on the eastern edge of what is now metropolitan Las Vegas. Layer for layer, the rocks of Frenchman match those of the Grand Canyon. And, like the canyon, Frenchman is famous for an enormous gap in the ages of two adjacent rock strata. Stephen Rowland, a paleontologist in the UNLV department of geoscience, told me that the Precambrian granite and schist at the base are about 1.7 billion years old. Sitting immediately above them is Tapeats sandstone, just a half-billion years old. The missing 1.2 billion years—25 percent of the earth’s age—is a gap known as the Great Unconformity. Rowland says that the granite and schist formed deep inside an ancient mountain range. Erosion eventually wore the mountains down, exposing the older rocks. Rising sea levels then buried them in sand, which became the younger stone.
Seeing the geologic remnants of the prehistoric ocean that once covered the region got me curious about the gargantuan water recovery effort that makes a desert megalopolis like Las Vegas possible, so I made my last stop the Clark County Wetlands Park Nature Preserve, just south of Frenchman. There, wastewater from the city is cleaned before being shunted back into Lake Mead, the city’s primary freshwater supply. A water purification plant handles most of the task, but the wetlands’ strategically planted vegetation helps. There is no smell, and the 130 acres of flora provide habitat for an impressive variety of wildlife.
As dusk descended and the air cooled, I heard a coyote in the distance. This may not be what most people think of when they imagine getting wild in Vegas, but for me it felt perfect.
While You’re There...
Hoover Dam Constructed in the 1930s on the Colorado River, this man-made wonder created Lake Mead, the largest reservoir in the United States.
Valley of Fire State Park See petrified logs dating from the Triassic and sandstone “beehives” resembling apartment buildings that may have provided shelter to the area’s early inhabitants, who left petroglyphs on canyon walls. For movie buffs, this is where Captain Kirk met his death in Star Trek: Generations.
Death Valley National Park Explore 3 million acres of wilderness, including the Badwater Basin salt flats, the lowest elevation in North America at 282 feet below sea level.
City Center When you’re ready to return to civilization, check out the engineering marvels of this new, 18-million-square-foot Las Vegas complex, the first in the city to earn the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED Gold environmental certification for features such as a natural gas electricity plant whose waste heat is used to generate hot water.