MY FIRST MORNING, I WAKE UP early and go, zooming south and east past Vegas's identical red-tile-roofed apartment complexes until development yields to the color brown and a matrix of evenly spaced creosote bushes. I veer toward Lake Mead, at 247 square miles the world's largest man-made lake and a favorite spot for college kids gone wild. I shadow the shoreline for about 50 miles, stopping once at an Indian trading post, where I stock up on fireworks. (Hey, everybody's doing it—and besides, I tell myself, a Roman candle might come in handy if I get lost in the desert.)

A few minutes later, I'm staring at a garden of eroded sandstone monoliths, colored every shade of red you can imagine. This is Valley of Fire State Park, and, like an acidhead's dream of Hell, these surreal arches, walls, pinnacles, and domes provide a vivid example of what happens when sand dunes get fossilized, uplifted, tumbled, carved by water and wind, and tinted by iron-oxide-laced groundwater.

I feel like I'm steering the Mars Pathfinder as I park the Bronco and exchange sandals for a pair of Merrells. I head out on a warm-up hike to Mouse's Tank, a catch basin surrounded by rock walls that naturally collect and hold water. I'm amazed by the astounding number of petroglyphs I see. Ancient rock art is found all over the Southwest, but every time I take in an image I haven't seen before—an octopus or a butterfly or something that looks like an airplane—it leaves me in a trancelike state, trying to get inside the mind of the artist who left it.

I think about which totems I would carve: a laptop, hiking boots, Funyuns? I climb up the back side of one of the house-size rocks overlooking the spot and look down at Mouse's Tank, a muddy puddle named for an 1890s Paiute fugitive who hid out here after murdering a couple of miners. Mouse lasted just a few weeks, living off the slimy green water until he left the area, got cornered by the law in Muddy Springs, Nevada, and was shot to death.

On the hike back, I meet a guy from Montana. His dog, Sadie, discovers a rare desert tortoise, but before she can play with it, the tortoise does its disappearing act and Sadie is left holding the bag. When I get back to the car, the sun is setting, and the sandstone looks even redder than it did this afternoon, as if the Great Spirit has been blowing on hot coals.