Lake Mead + Valley of Fire

[canib]

I had an awesome ride the other week around Lake Mead National Park (where the Hoover Dam lives), to the Valley of Fire Nation Park, then back to Vegas. I thought I'd share this ride for one very important reason, the offroading. That's right, I took my VFR off road.

Here's a link to a map of the area (warning, very large): http://www.nps.gov/lame/planyourvisi...ure_inside.pdf

Basically I started on the 147 near Las Vegas Bay, went up to Overton, back down to the Valley of Fire National Park, thru it on the 169 to the 15, then home. You'll notice the road curves up and around the lake, but you have to take the offshoots of the road to get to each of the beaches. Each of the offshoots offers it's own bit of twisties, so I took ALL of them of course :) These offshoots include Callville Bay, Echo Bay, and Overton Beach. On the way back from Callville I caught up to (nearly smacked into) a Park Ranger and had to cool my jets for a bit. Fortunately when I got back to the North Shore Road he went south and I went north.

Most of the road is all brand new. I mean brand spanking new. Not even dust on it. As you can see in the pictures I was the only person on it too. There was no one around for miles. My camera unfortunately can’t show you as far as the eye can see. You just can’t capture that awesome feeling either. Nothing but me and the jackrabbits. The new road got me about ¾ of the way to Overton. I hit an 8 mile stretch where there was no road what-so-ever. The highway crews had stripped it down to dirt and pea gravel, which is no fun to ride on, but I did it anyway  I stopped to take some shots and an old man Harley rider rattle-bounced down the road passed me. He shouted if I needed help and I waved my camera at him and yelled that I was cool. I got a shot of the “dirt road” next to the “off-road” and there’s no difference except there wasn’t plants no the so-called road.

After the 8 miles of no-road the regular road started up again, but it was horrible. I mean my grandchildren will know the suffering I went through in the search for greater twisties. I had to slow down to barely nothing because they road was so choppy. It’s roads like that which can blow out your fork seals and flatten your steering head bearings. (This is where someone makes the ‘hemorrhoid highway’ joke.) Anyways, I got to Overton, which is a boring backwater, then turned right around and headed for the Valley of Fire, which was awesome. I didn’t get any shots of it because I didn’t stop, but enjoy the ones of the area surrounding the Lake Mead North Shore Road. You’ll notice in the link to the map the government likes to shorten Lake Mead to LAME.

Anyways, enjoy the pics. That faucet is near one of the camp grounds. It was leaking away all by it’s lonesome so I shot a pic and turned it off.