From page we headed back out to Las Vegas and decided to stop off at one more destination to conclude our friends trip through the sandstone desert of the south.

Valley of fire is a beautiful place and is a protected state park just 40 minutes from las Vegas, which makes this place pretty accessible.

This is both a good thing and a bad thing because it is an easy stop of paved road for us but it is also easy for the massive line of people trying to get into the entrance and being the holidays and all, it was nothing less than a bit of a mess.

After waiting in a traffic jam complete with kids running around in the near by desert, we got through the entrance and headed straight for the fire wave region.

Fearing that there will be an ant hill of people walking up to the fire wave we took another approach through a short slot canyon and came in from the bottom up.

I have been here one other time in the past for a finale trip when I went to Puerto Rico and death valley and thought that this place was a great ending to a nice trip so I wanted to share that experience with Laura and my friends.

back to the hike, We first passed through a rainbow of color that literally looked like a candy store or a lush soap shop. It  was beautiful and once again, it was shocking to walk through.

I find it amazing that these colors can fuse themselves into a strata like layer as they have into these mounds but from what I understand, these colors represent different oxidation cycles that mixed in with various minerals that might have been available for the water to oxidize.

These sand hills than became petrified with the introduction of clays and other materials that bonded the sand together.  This was also apparent in the conglomerate stone that was found higher up on these buttes.

The result of all of this geologic wonder is a hallucinogenic state of swirling color and design that hundreds of people every day pay 8 dollars to see but very few actually truly notice when entering the park.

You have to get out into the desert a bit to find your way around and discover more of these bling bling colors in the south Nevada desert.  

We hiked up onto a mound of white and red striped sandstone which is amazing in itself to notice how defined and sharp the layers could actually be which I still don't quite understand.

unfortunately some things have changed since my last visit and the fire wave is not a known trail with a massive parking lot and people crawling all over this feature, yes literally crawling, and cartwheeling, and posing, and doing yoga, and.....it was ridiculous actually.

so much as to photo the novelty of it all and keep moving to find our own colorful canyon to ourselves.

We hiked up to the top of a bench where we enjoyed the sun setting over the horizon and over the fiery sandstone buttes which casted a nice color onto the valley below.

Unfortunately, this sunset was short lived and the colorful rocks flattened out a bit in photo but the memory of the amazing designs will never go away.

Actually as we hiked back to the car we saw some of the most amazing and colorful features in the park with layers of neopolotian ice cream looking marbled design in the sandstone.

Once we got to the car, the shutter stopped clicking as there is so much to enjoy around here.  Francesco wanted to travel upstream for a bit and see what could be found which was also to nobody's disappointment.

We headed upstream there were more stripping in the rocks with hollowed out walls and sections where a fade of sand must have evenly blew with the wind creating a nice color spectrum of red orange and yellow.  

This place is indeed fascinating and full of interesting photo opportunities for everyone to enjoy.

The park itself is quite big but there can still be a lot of people in the area that can flood the roads and the trails so I can hope that we can all keep a minimal amount of impact to this park.

We waited until the sun just about set and headed back to Las Vegas just as the winds started to pick up and the dust bowls were throwing trash and dirt onto the roads.

Next time we will have to venture farther out into the sandstone buttes to see what is far out in the desert.