Tuesday November 7th 2017

The nice fall weather with highs around seventy continues. Today I found a nice county park not to far away from the RV park. It’s called Wetlands Park and is along part of the Las Vegas Wash. It actually has the babbling sound of running water at one of the drier times of the year in the dessert.

Green areas of the Wetlands Park with the mountains across the valley to the southwest.

Early this afternoon I drove over to the Wetlands Park to check it out. There are lots of trails for walking and bicycle riding. Today I walked a couple of the trails, but may ride my bicycle here another time. Some of the trails are wide concrete paths and others are gravel. Signage isn’t the best and the bushes along the trails are high so it would be easy to get lost. Most likely I’d just come out a long way from my parking spot if I made a wrong turn. I’ll print out a map before I return.

Duck swimming in the pond in the reflection of the sun.

It was nice to see all the wild life in the park. There were many birds in the trees and on the ground. I focused my attention to the ducks in one of the ponds. They seemed to be on a speed patrol of the little pond as they moved rapidly across and around the pond. Maybe they were trying to stay away from the impressively large turtles that were also residents of the pond. One turtle was so big it barely fit on the rock it was using to catch the sun.

Large turtle sunning on a rock in the middle of the pond.

Gigantic turtle on an even bigger rock in the pond.

The only mammal I saw as a rabbit, but I saw evidence of larger animals. At several places along the trail I saw scat that probably came from coyotes. Dogs are prohibited from the trails. One of the listed reasons was the presence of coyotes.

Overall I walked and wandered over a mile during about two hours. The area is very big. I saw very few people on the trails and I only wandered through a small part of the park. I plan to go back and “get lost” in more of the park and I’m going to look for other area parks. This is an area that tourists to Las Vegas don’t visit. It’s only by looking beyond the attractions that I found the park.