Next stop- Valley of Fire State Park, adjacent to the Lake Mead Rec. Area. The Valley of Fire is lots of Red Rock formations which would have been a lot cooler if we hadn’t just come from Red Rocks Canyon. They were shooting a movie in Valley of Fire, “Redline”. We saw lots of equipment and hot fast cars. We came back from a hike and found they had filmed a chase scene and wrecked a really nice Porsche. They apparently shoot lots of movies and commercials in Valley of Fire. Scenes from Star Trek: Generations, Total Recall, Iron Eagle, Heldorado and many others. Another movie filmed there in the 50’s (or 60’s) called “The Professionals” left ruins of a building in an area called the “White Domes”. I think they monitor things better now and Hollywood has to clean up the site when they film now. We did a hike up to “Mouse’s Tank”, a watering hole where a renegade Piute Indian named Mouse hid out from the law. White man would not go into the Valley of Fire and the Indians would not reveal his location. There were lots of petroglyphs in the area.
We drove thru St George, UT. It was recommended as a place we might like to land. After driving thru, we decided it was a nice town, but maybe too “nice” for us. Too small town, a bit too Mormon (Not that there’s anything wrong with that).
We continued to Zion National Park. Just outside of the park we found a BLM campsite on the Virgin River for the night. It was a very busy site and most spots were full shortly after dark.