I have found Las Vegas to be one of the best places to live within a close proximity to some of the best dry canyons on the planet.  There is just countless activities to indulge into within a 200 mile radius of Las Vegas.

There are some fantastic challenging full day canyoneering trips as well as some non technical canyons to visit if you are just passing through.

Just to the south of Willow Springs and the black range is a section of conglomerate stone canyons that feed into Lake Mojave.

These canyons are non technical but you will have some navigation to negotiate as you enter into the canyons. 

The best approach is from El Dorado Road.  You want to drive to the end of El Dorado road which will be around 150ft from the lake shore and Nelsons Landing.

from the parking spot you want to hike north but you will need to pass drainage's along your hike and choose your descent and ascent hikes up these drainage's.

I recommend staying a bit closer to the shoreline so you don't miss any of the canyons but choose your route accordingly.

There are 4 canyons that I know about that you can visit.  The 2nd and the 3rd are the first pair, than the 6th and the 7th are the second pair of slots to visit.

Heather and I headed to the 2nd and the 3rd canyons, so our plan was to head up the 3rd canyon than head down the 2nd canyon, than head out.

We pick our way down and up the washes until we got to the third wash, than we started to head up the narrowing corridors.

The canyon walls eventually enclosed and at times, it was around 5-6 ft, wall to wall.

we work our way around the meandering narrows and what is interesting about this canyon is all of the boulders that have been lodged into the silt stone and clay stones which cemented them into some beautiful canyon corridors.

The first canyon continued to narrow than we found ourselves with some dry falls to climb. 

The secondary fall was around 15ft and heather took the lead to scale the dry fall. woohoo!!

The second canyon as not as interesting as the first canyon that we went to visit, which is the third canyon drainage that you drop into on your approach.

I recommend the third drainage over any of the two but if you want to have a nice little adventure on a Sunday, without any ropes, than running these two canyons is a good day.  webbing will help so I recommend having at least 15-20 for your party.