Mouse Tank trail is one of the first hiking trail after driving pass Valley of Fire State Park. The trail is essentially composed of red sand and all the rocks on the side of the trail are red as well. Most importantly, the most interesting part of Mouse Tank trail is that there are petroglyphs on the rock from the primitives who used to live in this area. Most of the petroglyphs are still kept in great shape for people to study and look at.
The trail itself is only about 0.8 miles round trip. It is rather short, but interesting. As we started the hike, we could see all the red sand on the trail. The color of the red sand was beautiful and looked like clay to us.
At the beginning of the trail, there was also a board showing many of the common petroglyph symbols that we would see along the trail and the board also stated the possible translation of each symbols. We took a photo of the board to see we could translate the petroglyph when we see it.
As we hiked into the canyon, we started to see the first rock with petroglyph symbols. The symbols were carved on the rock wall that has black stain on it. The symbol was kept in great shape and we could still clearly see what the symbol is. There were symbols for the sun, rain, people, and some strange bat like human creature. We were thinking that maybe the primitives were trying to indicate some alien like creature with that bat like symbol.
Then we walked further in, we saw even more symbols carved along the rock wall. There were just so many and it was so exciting to see these historic carvings. Walking on the red sandy trail and seeing these ancient petroglyphs made us feel like archaeologists! It was an amazing experience to have!
At the end of the trail was where Mouse Tank was. Mouse Tank was like a water tank in between the rocks and never got drained. We imagined that the primitive people could have used this water tank to preserve water and use it for later.
Overall, we highly recommend visiting Mouse Tank trail to get a great experience with petroglyphs. It was so wonderful to see the left over of the primitives and trying to translate these symbols were very fun as well.
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