On Bicycling: With Las Vegas As Your Hub Base, Valley of Fire, Death Valley and Zion Are A Natural Triple Crown

January 11, 2021 Alan Snel

By Alan Snel of LVSportsBiz.com

It’s January and cold in the mornings in Las Vegas. But by mid-day, it’s in the 50s and 60s and perfectly fine to enjoy riding a bicycle.

Las Vegas is also wonderfully located as a hub for some of the most gorgeous scenery and nature within three hours in places in California, Utah and Arizona.

Valley of Fire — One hour from Las Vegas

It’s a state park and it costs two bucks to bike into Valley of Fire. I drive on I-15 north, then take a right off the interstate about 45 minutes from Summerlin and park 10 miles off the highway.

I bike into Valley of Fire, where the red sandstone outcrops are a nice contrast to the gray and tan limestone.

The state park has campsites, but please park your cars in designated areas only.

The state web site said, “A rough road was built through this area in 1912 as part of the Arrowhead Trail, connecting Salt Lake City with Los Angeles. This road allowed people to travel through what became known as Valley of Fire. In the 1920s the name was coined by an AAA official traveling through the park at sunset.”

On Easter Sunday in 1934, Valley of Fire was formally opened as Nevada’s first state park.

Death Valley, California — Two hours from Las Vegas

Need to escape Dodge and this planet? May I suggest Death Valley, a place that has landscapes that appear from another planet.

I drive two hours through Pahrump, Nevada and head to Death Valley via eastern Inyo County, California. I pass the Amargosa Opera House and know that I’m about a half-hour from the Furnace Creek Visitor Center, where I park and head to my favorite road — Artist Road.

It’s a nine-mile loop in the foothills off the road that heads to Badwater.

Artist Road is a meandering one-way route through a canyon into the Black Mountains. The road slices through the mountain foothills, offering the ideal perch to gaze at the array of artist palette colors of violet, lime, yellow and purple thanks to the oxidation of different metals like iron and manganese.

Here is a previous LVSportsBiz.com story on Artist Road.

Zion National Park, Utah — Three hours from Las Vegas

From 2005 to 2013, annual visitor attendance at Zion National Park ranged from 2.5 million to nearly 3 million, U.S. National Park statistics show.

But in 2014, the number of visitors shot up to more than 3.2 million, with 2015’s numbers projected to shatter last year’s mark. In March, the number of visitors hit 481,150 — a record for that month. Two years ago in 2018, Zion National Park, which opened in 1919, attracted 4.3 million visitors, trailed only Great Smoky Mountains, Grand Canyon and Rocky Mountain national parks in park visitorship in the USA.

While the Zion Canyon Scenic Drive is the headliner, don’t forget to check out another road that doesn’t draw as much publicity.

It’s the Zion-Mount Carmel Highway, which starts off as a series of switchbacks for a few miles before it reaches a 1-mile tunnel that is off-limits to bicycles. If you’re on a bike, sometimes you can hitch a ride with a friendly motorist, or just drive with your bike and park at a turnout past the tunnel because this road is spectacular to pedal for the first 5 miles past the tunnel.

I highly recommend that you lock your bicycle near the guard station right after the end of the tunnel for a 1½-mile round-trip hike on the Canyon Overlook Trail. You will enjoy majestic vistas of the switchbacks and the land formations extending into the sky some 7,000 to 8,000 feet.

Speaking of hiking, if you do not want to ride a bicycle, you can certainly saunter your away along Zion’s nearly two dozen terrific trails.