Sloan Canyon

Yesterday, I was lucky enough to go on a hike with my friend and her family. We went to Sloan Canyon.

Sloan Canyon is a National Conservation Area . It is located just south of Las Vegas, Nevada, a short distance from the Las Vegas Strip. Sloan Canyon NCA protects 48,438 acres (196.02 km2) in a rapidly-developing area.

Sloan Canyon contains a great many petroglyphs and has been called the Sistine Chapel of Native American rock art due to their size and significance.[1] Archaeologists believe the more than 300 rock art panels with 1,700 individual design elements were created by native cultures from the Archaic to historic eras. (Wikipedia).

While we were there, we went "Lizard Hunting." Brooklynne wanted to make sure everyone was quiet so we would not scare them away!

I was feeling kinda' brave so I even held one! :)

Ryder liked holding them too!

They were REALLY hard for me to even see, but my friend was GREAT at it. Can you find the lizard?

Check out that tail!

For being so little, Grayson was a great Mini-Hiker-

And, of course he LOVED to climb!

Ryder was very proud of himself (I was too). Look how high he climbed.

Kaden went with the older group and hiked to a Red Tailed Hawk's nest. He was bummed not to find any feathers, but they did find some bones from small rodents (the hawk's diet)!

We LOVED seeing all of the Petroglyphs. If you do not know what those are-this is what Wikipedia had to say....

Petroglyphs (also called rock engravings) are images created by removing part of a rock surface by incising, pecking, carving, and abrading. Outside North America, scholars often use terms such as "carving", "engraving", or other descriptions of the technique to refer to such images. Petroglyphs are found world-wide, and are often (but not always) associated with prehistoric peoples. The word comes from the Greek words petros meaning "stone" and glyphein meaning "to carve" .

Just a bit of history for you....Pretty neat, huh?

It was a GREAT day, and we had so much fun going on a new adventure!

Oh yeah, we also saw a humming bird's nest (this one is for you Joanna). You can see how tiny it is in the picture below.

It was another PERFECT day-until, that is- after hiking for about four hours, I realized I had locked the keys in my truck!!! Oops- LOL :)