This one’s been a long time coming.

Today, I’m going to take you on an adventure through the gorgeous Red Rock Canyon, just outside of Las Vegas.

If you’re a newer reader, you may not know that last January, I attended Steve Pavlina’s Conscious Success Workshop, and last year I wrote a bit about the workshop experience itself. What I haven’t written about yet is a powerful experience which happened the very next day, during my return to Red Rock Canyon.

You see, people who attend Steve’s workshops are not ordinary people, not by a long shot. From my experience, they’re a heck of a lot smarter and more interesting than the “average” person you might run into, and many of them had planned to stay in town the day after the workshop in anticipation of any meet-ups that might occur after the workshop was over.

In fact, exactly one year ago today, that’s precisely what happened. And lucky for us, one of the workshop alumni, an awesome fellow named Dana, had an abundance of experience in search and rescue teams (as well as being an EMT-B), so we felt pretty confident letting him lead the way. Our explorations filled most of that day, so I’m only going to share the highlights with you here, including some of the most beautiful rock formations I have ever seen; a mysterious, abandoned house; a red, alien tree; and some very tiny caves.

Surprises Along the Path

Even though Red Rock Canyon is on the eastern edge of the Mojave Desert, the canyon area itself is quite different. Nestled between rock formations is a wealth of plant and animal life supported by the streams which can be found within, and the photo you see above was taken right before things started to get stunning.

Out of the 100+ photos I took that day, this is probably my favorite. A seemingly natural formation, these massive red boulders form a tepee shape. And look how colorful the rocks are below that. This place is a rock-lover’s (and climber’s) dream.

Along the path, we came across this intriguing echo of the past. The story goes that someone wanted to build a house here a hundred or so years ago, but soon gave up because there were no official roads leading so deep into the canyon. In the end, it proved to be a good place to take a breather, as my friends Robin & DT from the workshop so effortlessly demonstrate in the photo above. 🙂

Coming across this little mountain of sorts made my eyes feel weird. In a strange way, it was hard to judge its actual size. In any case, it reminded me of something from The Land Before Time movie.

Now here’s a bizarre little specimen. Instead of rough bark, this tree has a very smooth, red skin. It was so smooth, I can’t even describe it as bark. This tree has skin, most likely an adaptation to such dry air.

A hike around the canyon is not complete without incidental cave sightings. The whole area around this cave was surrounded by the small pebbles you see in the lower half of the photo, almost as if it were once the bottom of an ancient stream bed. Indeed, that is quite likely. And from the boulder on the bottom left, you can also see how almost all of the boulders in the area are made of sedimentary rock with layers of color buried within them.

To finish this visual tour off, I present to you the cutest cave I’ve ever seen, if it can be called such a thing. Apparently a natural formation produced by erosion, this little cave would provide a perfect shelter in the event of a sudden downpour. Remember, if you’re hiking around Red Rock Canyon and you need shelter, you can probably find a cave around if you keep a sharp eye.

Conclusion

I hope you’ve enjoyed this brief tour of some of the areas within Red Rock Canyon, Nevada. I invested a good amount of time in cropping and tuning the colors of each of the three dozen photos of this shoot to accurately reflect what we saw that day. So thanks for virtually joining me today. A huge thanks also goes out to everyone who made my time in Las Vegas awesome! (especially Kevin who hosted me and a few others who were going to the workshop)

And keep in mind, there were many photos that I didn’t include in this article. We also came across a trickling waterfall that had roughly 1 drip per minute, a mossy stream, pink cacti, rock climbers scaling a cliff edge, and mysterious roses placed alongside the path. You can find all of that in the accompanying photo gallery.