Editor's note:
This is part of an occasional series of articles about places in Southern Nevada few people go.
All right, so it turned out to be not exactly a place few people go.
On the drive to the trail head, we nearly caught up with another vehicle, which continued past where my friend Zep and I planned to launch our assault on Fortification Hill. But when we ascended from the rocky ravine to the ridge on its right, we saw two figures approach along its trail.
Plenty of other day-hikers have left their names and comments in the logbook, in a metal box tucked into a stone cairn at the peak. No doubt they've found more challenging hikes in or around Southern Nevada, but few would claim to have found a more rewarding destination, a spectacular vista that encompasses Hoover Dam, much of Lake Mead, Boulder City and, in the hazy northwest distance, Las Vegas. We would share the view with a couple from Boulder City just enough older to hearten us.
For the six-mile, 1,400-foot ascent is no breeze—a long, slow trudge upward, made welcome only by the journey endured to start it. Almost three miles past the dam, the bone-jarring dirt road leaves U.S. 93, crossing under the first flyover of the dam-bypassing 93-to-be, then meandering quite a bit past the point at which you imagine it can't possibly continue much farther.
Ordinarily, the terminus is a barren of rock and scrub, with Fortification Hill looming like slag heap, its broad, flat plateau cresting the skirt of rocks it has shed over the centuries. But the wet winter has cast a verdant veil over the gray and salmon landscape. And we'd picked a splendid, bright morning to climb, feeling a little like the Von Trapps traipsing across a florid Alpine pass.
Well, just a little. The rocky slopes were studded with blue staves of lupine blooms and bursts of yellowcups, along with scattered cholla and crimson-needled barrel cacti, nestled in cracks. Now and then, a lizard would scuttle across the path, and at one point we saw a hummingbird sampling blooms. But the hills were a little too alive with the drone of tourist helicopters, careening around the hill and heading for the Grand Canyon.
About halfway up, we stopped at a natural landmark, a slight flat with an arrangement of boulders that seems to have been placed there for hikers' respite. The Boulder Citians caught up with us and we chatted a bit and chugged some water. They took off first, up the steeper slope, and we watched them hang a right at the edge where it meets the rock wall. The trail follows this edge a distance until it reaches a fissure. Here we caught up with them, as they began to scramble up this jagged crack, maybe 10 feet.
This is the one dicey point of the hike, where you sense a misstep could send you tumbling hundreds of feet down the slope as one bone after another snaps. (There goes an ulna! Ouch—that's a femur!) Our companions could have been climbing an attic ladder.
We managed another 30 feet or so of less-menacing trail to the plateau, and a relatively level walk, a mile or so through a landscape of gray rock spotted with craggy boulders, yucca and cholla.
The peak is a promontory of oxidized rocks, marked with an upright pole. After admiring the phenomenal view, we sat, scribbled log entries, ate our snacks. Zep, a seasoned hiker, swapped trail tales with our companion while I took snapshots. The dam, so inspiring in proximity, seems an incidental adornment, hardly the sine qua non of the resplendent blue vista.
A better photographer would have plucked Las Vegas from the haze, but the city remained a tease. I expected to feel figuratively above it, too, having reduced its polychrome temples to a clot of pale, chalky polygons. But from Fortification Hill it takes on the aspect of the Heavenly City in an allegorical painting. Or at least the secular analog, which in a way it has become.
The saddest leg of any trek is the trip home, accented in this case by the reprise of the dirt road. But for this sometime hiker, the discomfort was leavened by the having-done-it. I hope I can still do it at our fellow hikers' ages, and that they're still doing it, too.