Shooting sheep and scorpions (tracks and traces at Valley of Fire)

At Valley of Fire State Park, Nevada's oldest and one of the loveliest, I've done the White Domes walk several times. It's beautiful, with its deep natural stairs, slot canyon, and pale fine sand underfoot. This time, though, I wanted to see petroglyphs. There are so many petroglyph sites within reach of Vegas that it seemed a shame that the most memorable ones I've seen are at Newspaper Rock 'way over in eastern Utah.

So we stopped at Atlatl Rock, named for the dart throwing tool that appears in the petroglyphs. There's a steel walkway up to the viewing platform, built into the rock beside the petroglyphs. It's amazing to me that people made these representational works about 4000 years ago, and we can still clearly recognise some of the shapes.