Cathedral Gorge State Park

Ever since reading about Merrill Jessop's motel in Caliente, I've been intrigued by the town. I don't know that I ever knew much about the town, and all my misconceptions about a potential FLDS holdout were based in little to no actual fact. However, when Cydnee suggested we head up to the cluster of Nevada State Parks that surround Caliente, I was in.

We headed out for a one day adventure on July 5th, taking advantage of a precious day off work for the 4th of July observed. We finally got to see the blur out the window known as Alamo. We saw some great dirt roads wandering off into the horizon. And we drove and drove, and then drove some more. Finally we wandered into the not so small town of Caliente (at least not the one motel gas stop I had dreamed up). It was a nice sized town surrounded by some nice desert landscape. There was even a large train station in the middle of town.

We passed through and headed north to Cathedral Gorge State Park. This little gem was totally unexpected. There are some very unique "caves" carved out of the side of the mountains surrounding a small valley. Even though they are called caves on the signs, they are really small canyons, which walls appear to be over 100 feet high in places, but never longer than around 500 feet. They were really fun to wander through.

Taylor, Will and Reagan all managed to get plenty dirty. The favorite of the kids was finding "secret doors" to crawl through, and climbing up to little caves.

We even managed to hike through as a family while I carried Lyndsee in her pack in front of me, because it was often too narrow to make it with her on my back.

Taylor felt like a real explorer.

After having some lunch and then exploring the caves, we set out on a small hike to the Miller Point Overlook. You can drive around the mountain to this overlook, but the really adventurous will brave the 1-mile hike each way (I especially like the warning sign). This was not a very difficult hike and all of our kids did fine. The biggest problem we had was trying to keep the kids from racing up the stairs.

After returning from Miller Point, we did some more exploring through the "caves" while letting Lyndsee take a nap. We then headed out of the park and drove through the small silver mining town of Pioche. There was a lot of historic buildings in this quaint little piece of history. One of the most exciting was the Veitch House (bottom left) that served as the first LDS meetinghouse in Pioche.

After driving through Pioche, we headed back to Caliente to grab some grub, and headed to Kershaw-Ryan State Park to eat our hamburgers and chicken nuggets.

What we found was a little oasis stashed away in the desert. The park was originally a private residence, but was donated to the state. In the day use area, there are multiple picnic sites, a playground and a volleyball court. There was even a small swimming pool.

We followed a trail for a little ways up the canyon at the top of the park, and found a fun little bridge to take some pictures on.

After dinner and wandering around, we finally had to call it a day. Driving back to Las Vegas in the dark desert, we all agreed that we had had a great adventure.