Here it is, the 7th day of our stay in Las Vegas and we’ve only been into a casino to eat the breakfast butter.
Vegas is a draw for many things:
some come for the shopping
some come for the shows
some come for the lounging around the pool
some come for the casinos
Gary and I - we come for the hiking. How many of you knew that Vegas was a hiking mecca? Well, one only has to look around - Vegas is surrounded by mountains.
We had planned to spend today inside trying to catch up on our lives. We can’t just tour and hike every day, sometimes we need to do bookkeeping, housecleaning, e-mails, laundry, shopping and all those little tasks that need to be done. However, the temperature is supposed to reach 74 today and reach only 54 and 56 on Monday and Tuesday. What would you do? Stay inside and look out on a sunny, warm, beautiful day and wait until a 56 degree day to go outside to hike? Nope, not us.
We’ve checked some websites and have a good list of hikes in the area and have chosen 2: the Bootleg Canyon up to the Black Mountain and the Red Mountain hike and the Tunnel hike. Bootleg Canyon is in Boulder City and from the trailhead, you can see the trail going up to a saddle with Red Mountain on the left with the antennas, the zip lines and the bike trails. Black Mountain is on the right.
It was a thoroughly delightful day for hiking and we met several others on their way up and some, who had started long before we had, on their way down. It was one of those days when you couldn’t ask for anything better: it was sunny but not too hot and it was just breezy enough to cool you down on a hot hike. Across the desert floor we hiked and soon found ourselves facing Bootleg Canyon with the saddle high above us in the middle.
Originally the CCC has built the trail in the 1930’s but it had fallen into disrepair until many in Boulder City decided to repair it and restore it to its original glory. One of the trademarks of the CCC was the stone work it put into trails and we saw some examples of this today. We saw steps and retaining walls. Another trade mark of the CCC was the use of switchbacks which make the climb easier. I’m all for ‘easier.’
We chose to hike to Black Mountain first and then up Red Mountain for lunch. Red Mountain not only has lots of antennas but also several zip-lining wires and a start for a swift downhill mountain biking course. By 12:30 we were on Red Mountain and I was positioning myself for pictures - just in time for a group of zip liners and a group of mountain bikers. Good timing. ow, of course, I’m not a professional nor do I have professional equipment. And the action today was pretty fast but I tried my best to capture it for our memories. And, do they ever whiz past.
Look at the line they take through the rocks.
There is a wooden platform about 2’ high at the top of the hill with a ramp attached to it. Sometimes the bikers ride for time and start on this ramp to give them extra speed as they charge down the hill.
There were 4 couples on the zip lines. They sign up at the bottom of the hill, get their equipment and their first lessons and then are brought up the hill in a van. Then - they get to carry their equipment up the last part of the hill to the lines. They got hooked up to the lines, practiced their final instructions and were sent down the line to the next small knob where they stopped and waited for the whole group to get there. Then they finished their run down the next line - a much longer run. Short run to get the hang of it and then a longer run to enjoy it.
Here are two couples all lined up and getting their final instructions.
The views were amazing from the top of both Red and Black Mountains. However, neither today nor the previous day when we hiked in the Red Rocks did we have a clear day. Is it the smog around this city or is it the dust in the air? Another hiker who was a that top with us told us that most people think that the air around Las Vegas is clear because it is so dry. Wrong - there are generally particulates in it, dust particles from all the desert which surround the city. Interesting.
We returned to the car and decided that it was time for an ice cream cone. Going to the IPhone, we typed in ‘ice cream’ and found Grandma Daisy’s in Bounder City, just a short drive up the hill. Nice little store which also had some yummy-looking home made chocolates. Unfortunately Grandma Daily and Aunt Tulip were the only two working on this busy warm Saturday and they were petty busy. The ‘Help Wanted’ sign on the front door told us why. Sitting outside eating our ice cream on a warm day with other tourists milling about - perfect.
By the way, Boulder City, built for the workers on the Hoover Dam, is the only Nevada City without gambling in its city limits.
Then we decided to finish the hike we had started on the 21st, only this time we are taking the next trailhead closer to the tunnels and starting there. We get smarter as we age. We parked at the correct trailhead, along with about 30 other cars. As we were getting ready to start a large family group of 3 generations started down the trail ahead of us. There were about 12 of them and they had food bags, obviously going to eat along the trail.
This trail was level, a nice change from the morning trails. And, the views were superb. Lake Mead was incredibly blue, the boats carving trails in its surface as they came back to the marina for the night. In back was the desert with mountains towering over it. The tunnels were fun and we enjoyed the hike along the old railroad bed reading all of the historical plaques as we went.
But we tried to imagine building these tunnels, through volcanic rock with jackhammers drilling, dust swirling around them in searing temperatures. Oh, and did I mention the falling rocks? But, drill they did and in 1931, working round the clock, they completed drilling all 5 tunnels in the tunnels in 5 months. These tunnels were in use until 1961 and in 1962, the rails were sold as scrap. If you’ve seen the movie ‘The Gauntlet’ with Clint Eastwood, you’ve seen these tunnels during a motorcycle chase. In 1984 the trail was nominated to the National Register of Historic Places.
Here’s more about those falling rocks. As we all know necessity is the mother of invention and the cloth hats that the men wore to protect their heads against the sun were no match for the falling volcanic rock. Thus, both the men who worked on the tunnels and the men who worked on the bridge, fearful of falling objects, used to dip their cloth hats in tar, let them harden and then wear them that way. This is the origin of ‘hard hats.’ Six Companies, which managed the construction, ordered thousands of what were called ‘hard boiled hats’ and the rest is history.
At one spot we learned about Ragtown, the spontaneous community founded by men and families who worked on the Hoover Dam. It is the flat section near Lake Mead in the picture below. Because it was so close to the future Dam site, men crowded into it hoping to get a job working on the Dam. It was below the railroad tracks and, though it looks as if it is on the lake’s edge, before the Dam was built, they had to walk a ways to get to the Colorado River to wash clothing, bathe and get water for their other needs.
The water was filled with sediment and not good for drinking or cooking. Milk had to be trucked in and refrigeration was almost nonexistent.
Most people lived in tents, cardboard boxes, tin scraps and what ever they could find to serve as shelter and in the summer temperatures with swirling dust, life was extremely harsh. In 1931, there were 30 straight days where the temperature did not get below 100 and the high was 138. Over 25 men, women and children died during that first summer. Eventually Ragtown swelled to 5000 men, women and children. Winter was equally harsh.
Getting food and other supplies was extremely difficult since none of these people had any transportation. However, there was a store in Ragtown owned by Murl Emery and his wife. They sold goods on the credit system. If you could pay, you did and if you could not, you were given credit until you could. With wages on the Dam at 50 cents per hour, many needed credit. One woman in her memoirs said that he actually told people to pay what they thought the item was worth. Sometimes goods came in so fast that he did not have time to put the price on an item and told people to pay what they had paid the last time they had bought it. The story is that only one many failed to pay his debt to the Emerys - and he was dead.
Emery was a lifesaver to the people of Ragtown but there is more to his story. He was a great river man having learned about the Colorado River from his father. He figured out how to navigate the river when it was extremely low by putting a big airplane propeller on the back. Maybe some of you have ridden in a boat like this on the Everglades.
The end of the trail was the parking ramp at the Dam. We were tired since we had been hiking most of the day but a goal is a goal and we were determined.
Finally, we were looking over the parking ramp at the Dam and it was time to turn back. The sun had fallen behind the mountains and dusk was coming on.
At the end of the hike, we found that the large family group was in the two trucks behind us in the parking lot. As we were changing shoes, one of the women in the group looked over, and, remembering us from several hours ago, laughed and stated that we much be real hikers. ‘How many miles did you two do?’ she asked. We laughed and told her that she didn’t want to know, that it was more than we had planned. Then she and her husband walked up to us and said: ‘We’re from Iowa.’ Yeah, right. No, actually they were: Jose and Manuela from Muscatine who moved there in 1969. They are staying with their son in Las Vegas for the winter months.
14 1300’
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