Red Rock Canyon

Why should it be a National Park?

Seventeen miles west of the Las Vegas Strip, the desert stands up. The Keystone Thrust runs along the front of the Spring Mountains here, a fault where gray limestone was shoved up and over red Aztec sandstone about sixty-five million years ago, which is why the escarpment has a red bottom and a gray top and looks, from the valley floor, like it was assembled backward. The sandstone is petrified sand dunes, and the cross-bedding in the cliffs is the record of wind that blew across this place in the Jurassic. The scale is easy to miss from the casinos. The escarpment rises three thousand feet. Canyons cut back into it — Pine Creek, Icebox, First Creek, Oak Creek — and several hold water year-round, which in the Mojave is the difference between a canyon and a refuge. Bighorn sheep work the cliffs. Wild burros, descendants of prospectors' stock, graze the flats. The rock climbing here is world famous, thousands of routes on sandstone that draws people from everywhere.

The visitation numbers are the argument nobody makes out loud. Red Rock draws around three million people a year, more than most National Parks receive, on thirteen miles of one-way scenic drive that now runs on timed entry because the road could not absorb the crowds. It does this with a BLM budget, which is a fraction of what an equivalent Park Service unit would get.