Two Surprises

Charlie and I moved from Murrieta, California to Mesquite, Nevada five years ago to escape the urban drama, high cost, congested roads, and costly state income tax that didn’t fit a retirement lifestyle.

We didn’t know anything about Mesquite except that it was a “border” city with several casinos and a Del Webb community that was under construction, and it got nasty hot in the Summer. Oh, yeah… it was also home to eight golf courses!

Once we got to poking around the area, and making friends in the community, we discovered a couple of very pleasant surprises: (1) The health care in the region is 10+; and (2) the natural environment presents numerous opportunities for world class hiking.

Mesquite itself has a basic hospital for emergencies and simple procedures. One goes there if he is squirting blood or has broken a limb. The regional hospital, a 45-minute drive north on I-15 in the city of St. George, Utah is a very high-level campus with the most modern facilities and equipment combined with excellent doctors and staff. Both Charlie and I have worked at hospitals in previous lives, and we can assert that the medical care provided in St. George is on par with Scripps in San Diego or Cedars of Sinai in Los Angeles. First Class all the way… and they take our insurance! Another benefit: many of the specialist physicians have convenient office hours in Mesquite for consultation!

Over the past five years, I have availed myself of this wonderful medical care by having both of my hip joints replaced with artificial ones and, most recently, having cataract surgery on both eyes. Charlie, who has all manner of medical issues, has found great specialists in St. George to tend to her regular needs. In addition, she found a very sharp podiatrist who resolved her broken foot and a pain specialist who “reinflated” a crushed spinal disk that occurred when she fell from a ladder. In a week, Charlie will be undergoing a hiatal hernia surgery up in St. George, something that she has been looking forward to for many months.

Kudos to the superb medical care in this area!

I was not a big “outdoors” person when I moved to Mesquite. I had done a lot of hiking when I was younger in Yosemite National Park (Yosemite Falls, Half Dome) and the high Sierra (Mount Whitney a couple of times), and had skied quite a bit in Mammoth Mountain, Lake Tahoe, June Lake, Badger Pass, and Dodge Ridge. I did a “down and back” hike into the Grand Canyon and a number of cool hikes at Arches National Park. But all of that was back in my salad years… before age 70, before the artificial hips, etc.

It was not long after we relocated to Mesquite that I met a bunch of old coots like me who enjoyed hiking around the deserts and mountains of this region. There was an organized hiking group, called the Desert Fossils, and an informal group, consisting of my neighbors Mac and Lloyd. The hiking club typically planned two treks per week on established trails, while our informal group usually did one major hike per week… typically “off trail”.

Between the two hiking groups, I have now hiked most of the interesting stuff within a 90-mile radius: Valley of Fire, Lake Mead, Desert National Wildlife Refuge, Beaver Dam Wash National Conservation Area, Pine Valley, Gunlock, Virgin Mountain, Cedar Pocket, the Arizona Strip, Grand Canyon Parashant, and Zion National Park.

I did not know, when we moved to this area, that it is in a complicated geologic setting featuring earthquake faults, volcanoes, “red rocks”, slot canyons, and such. The 45-minute drive north to St. George on I-15 drives through the Virgin River Gorge, which is a “mini” Grand Canyon visual feast that I never tire of. Pine Valley Mountain, which forms the backdrop for the city of St. George, is 10,365 feet tall and is the largest laccolith (a mass of igneous rock that has been intruded between rock strata causing uplift in the shape of a dome) on Earth.

Last week, I joined up with the Desert Fossil hiking club to do the “Yant Flats/Candy Cliffs” hike, one of the few popular ones in the area that I’d never tried. We had to 4×4 drive a Jeep about six miles up a graded road and then trek another mile on foot up a sandy trail to Yant Flats. The “payoff” was the so-called Candy Cliffs, which are sandstone cliffs and petrified sand dunes colored in shades of white, orange and red. Very pretty and unusual.

There were 24 people on the hike. When we arrived at the Candy Cliffs, I followed an experienced guy named Gary… and we almost immediately got separated from the other 22 hikers. Gary seemed to know what he was doing so I tagged along, descending several hundred feet down a sandstone cliff. It was beautiful and dramatic, well worth the effort.

All the while, there was no sign of the bulk of the hiking group. Finally, we hiked up the steep sandstone cliffs with great effort to the original place where we’d last seen the rest of the group. No sign or sound of them, so we looked around until we found footprints in sand and then followed them about a half mile until we came to another sandstone canyon area. There they were, down the slope a bit, having snacks. The group seemed quite pleased with their adventure, so I didn’t let on that they’d missed the most spectacular formations in the “real” Candy Cliffs area.

Ignorance is bliss, I guess.

One of the great things about living where we do is that visitors (friends and family) often want to do some hiking. Zion National Park, which is only a 90-minute drive from Mesquite, is always a Bucket List goal of visitors. However, it has become so crowded in the past few years that I avoid it if possible. Angel’s Landing, one of the most famous hikes in America, now requires a permit, and The Narrows (a slot canyon with 1,000’ cliffs) is only doable at certain times of the year. Anyway, “been there, done that”. Accordingly, I try to direct visitors wanting to hike to places like Valley of Fire, The Vortex, and (now) the Candy Cliffs. Lots of drama with a minimal investment of time and ground-pounding.

I am not sure how much more hiking I will be doing.

I will be 76 years young in a couple of weeks and don’t have the leg strength or stamina that I used to. My informal hiking group (Mac and Lloyd) has dissolved, as Lloyd moved to South Africa and my neighbor Mac has developed a severe medical condition that does not allow hiking or bike riding, things that he loves to do. I could still hike with the Desert Fossils; however, I’m not keen on big hiking groups… they tend to overwhelm the peace and nature that one seeks on a hike into the Southwest desert.

My son Jeff and wife Carol will be visiting us during the holiday season. They will probably want to do a little hiking.

I will have to think of something cool.