At 4:30 p.m. on Friday, my husband asked if I’m interested in going to Cathedral Gorge State Park.

By 6:00 p.m., we were on the road.

Undecided what our exact itinerary would be, we packed for two overnights, just in case, and we set out for the seven-hour drive ahead of us. Since we were getting a late-in-the-day start on Friday, we drove the four-and-a-half hours to Eureka, NV, via Hwy 50 that evening, stayed at one of the only lodging options in town (SureStay), which also happened to look a little bit like an old asylum from the outside, but we were pleasantly surprised at how decent the rooms were. Arriving a little after 11 p.m., we were more than ready for some restful sleep that night.

Saturday morning, we got up early and grabbed a quick breakfast in the hotel lobby. After smooth and relatively uneventful travel Friday night, we looked outside and noticed it had snowed since last night and, in fact, was still lightly snowing that morning, which made Saturday’s three-hour drive to Cathedral Gorge State Park a bit interesting.

The snow had not substantially accumulated on the roadway, but the temperatures were cold, so what had fallen was very light, compromising visibility, and the surface of the road was definitely icy in some stretches. Indeed, a few miles into our morning, we drove past a Ford Mustang on its roof in the ditch. 😳

By the time we reached Ely, NV, on Hwy 50, the entire back of our vehicle was caked in snow and ice.

But we did get to take in some beautiful mountain views on our route.

Just before we turned off of US Hwy 50 and onto US Hwy 93, we got this neat view.

Cathedral Gorge State Park

A little before 11:00 a.m., we reached our destination of Cathedral Gorge State Park, one of Nevada’s first state parks, named in 1935.

We stopped at the visitor center, grabbed a park map, and headed to the pay station. A short drive from there was our first stop: Moon Slots.

Moon Slots in Cathedral Gorge State Park

Of the sights and stops we made in Cathedral Gorge State Park, Moon Slots was probably our favorite.

I was fascinated with the very hard, dense, and smooth walking surfaces in between the formations. The flat surface with ghostly trails and markings kind of reminded me of the Racetrack Playa in Death Valley.

This reminded me of a sand castle of sorts.

Both my husband and I also thought the area reminded us of The Badlands in South Dakota.

The siltstone and clay formations are pretty cool in and of themselves, but the innumerable slot canyons at Cathedral Gorge State Park are especially unique and downright fascinating.

From the state park brochure: Volcanoes, earthquakes, water, and erosion created the spires and buff-colored cliffs of Cathedral Gorge. Modern-day erosion continues to sculpt the formations and deeply incised canyons, but the geologic processes that produced the badlands landscape occurred over tens of millions of years.

The landscape 2.5 million years ago was buried in a freshwater lake of the Pliocene era. The canyons were cut into the old muds that millions of years ago were at the bottom of the lake.

The variation in layers of rock and sediment tell the story of fluctuating lake levels and the flow of rivers and streams that deposited silt and clay (altered volcanic ash from the Caliente Caldera Complex, south of Cathedral Gorge) into the lake.

From the outside, it doesn’t look like much.

As we ventured into our first slot canyon in Moon Slots of Cathedral Gorge, however, it was like nothing else we’ve ever experienced. Yes, we’ve hiked in the Kanarra Falls slot canyon and Little Wild Horse Canyon, but those were quite different than the slot canyons in Cathedral Gorge.

And many of the slot canyons have various “forks” to further explore that off-shoot from the main canyon.

The texture of some of the canyon walls was particularly distinctive. If you didn’t really know where you were, you might even think the canyon walls looked like hollowed out giant sequoia trees.

Once inside the slot canyons, it was close quarters, making it challenging to get photos or videos that fully captured the magnitude of the tall canyon walls along with the narrowness of some of the passageways – and certainly not the chilly temperatures trapped between the canyon walls.

Some of the canyons got really, really narrow, triggering my slight claustrophobia, and I had to back out of the canyon.

For as neat as some of the slot canyons were, it is also worth noting that many of the canyons in Cathedral Gorge had some amount of bird poop, feathers, and remnants of captured rodents and even other bird parts on display. Surprisingly, these “features” weren’t discussed in the state park literature or in any of the videos we watched online before heading here.

Some of the “rotunda” areas of the slot canyons were home to either pigeons or hawks, and by the looks of it, they also used it as their bathroom, torture chamber, dining room, and bedroom. We could hardly enter any single slot canyon and not at least hear pigeons cooing or see evidence that we were invading their space. In some areas of the canyons, you didn’t really want to touch the canyon walls because they were covered with bird poop. I chose not to take photos of this “side” of the slot canyon experience. 🙂

At the top of the leaning rock in this slot canyon, you can see part of a hawk’s nest.

After we felt that we’d explored the slot canyons at Moon Slots enough, we moved along to the next stop on the route: Cathedral Slots.

Cathedral Slots in Cathedral Gorge State Park

On the way there was a round, stone, tower-like structure. After reading the sign, we learned it was a water tower that was built in the 1930s for the park.

We parked in the area for Cathedral Slots and began roaming around to see what other slot canyons we could find. There were a few, but it turns out they were all pretty short canyons in terms of distance, so it didn’t take us long to explore them.

While much of the canyon walls was textured like giant sequoia trees, some also had a different, equally unique texture.

Once we’d explored deep into the various slot canyons we could find, we ventured on top of some of the formations around Cathedral Slots for some spectacular panoramic views.

I thought this layer of exposed rocks stuck in the mud formation resembled barnacles on the hull of a ship.

Beyond the Cathedral Slots area is a short trail that leads up to Miller Point, so we headed through the valley floor, surrounded by canyon walls, and up the series of stairs to the overlook at the top.

The parts of Cathedral Gorge that we visited had little to no vegetation, so this lone juniper tree on top of the canyon wall stood out to me.

The gorge below Miller Point had formations that were reminiscent of the hoodoos in Bryce Canyon.

Once we ascended the final stairs to the Miller Point overlook at the top, we turned around and headed back down to the valley floor, where upon returning to our vehicle, we enjoyed another tailgate PB&J lunch before continuing onto our next destination.

Having hiked in a couple of other slot canyons previously, the slot canyons we ventured into in Cathedral Gorge were a little bit different in that they were constructed of mud instead of rock, and they all were relatively short, eventually reaching a dead end, or the canyon simply got too narrow to comfortably continue. But they were all really fun to explore.

Echo Canyon

In the visitor center at Cathedral Gorge, I saw a photo of a bridge in the area that I was interested in seeing (I love bridges!), so before making the trek back up to Tahoe, we headed out on the rural Nevada roads toward Echo Canyon State Park.

But before visiting Echo Canyon, we drove out to Spring Valley State Park to check out Eagle Valley Reservoir, which we believe is a popular summer destination; however, when we arrived, it was a ghost town, save for a lonely ice shack on the frozen reservoir.

We doubled back and found the rural route to Echo Canyon.

Not far into the park was the pedestrian bridge spanning across a barely existent, partially frozen creek. But the bridge was still neat, and I’m certain during other times of the year, when they release water from Echo Canyon Reservoir, this creek probably expands.

It was windy and cold through Echo Canyon, so we didn’t stay very long to explore, and settled for merely taking a few photos of the bridge and then retreating to the warmth of our vehicle.

While I was wandering around the trail near the bridge, my husband climbed up to the top of the adjacent rocky ridge to take photos from above.

We headed back on the road to Tonopah, NV, which would be our overnight stay before finishing the remaining drive up to Tahoe the following day.

After dark that evening, while back on the Extraterrestrial Highway, we had clear, dry roads. But this stretch of road is also an expansive area for free-range cattle. This was the night we came uncomfortably close to colliding with a huge cow standing broadside in the middle of our driving lane.

The road was pitch black, the sky was pitch black, and the cow was pitch black. Despite the ET Highway being unbelievably flat, offering the ability to see for miles in every direction, that cow blended in with its surroundings so well, my husband had to slam on the brakes in the final seconds and divert slightly into the oncoming traffic lane to avoid striking the cow.

We both sat there, stunned for a few minutes in our stopped vehicle, realizing the fate we had just escaped.

Fortunately, our brakes worked well and there wasn’t another car in sight, but had we not missed the cow, we would have been in a terrible accident, literally, in the middle of nowhere rural Nevada in the middle of January.

Hitting a deer is one thing. Hitting a cow is entirely something else. I doubt our vehicle, even as big as it is, would have survived such a collision. So, thankfully, for our sake and the cow’s sake, my husband avoided it.

We reached Tonopah without any other notable incidents and were relieved to get to rest for the remainder of the night. When we woke up early the next morning, however, it had snowed in Tonopah, and let’s just say the visibility and road conditions weren’t ideal.

By the time we reached Carson City for a pit stop, we estimated that our vehicle had accumulated an extra hundred pounds of ice.

After all that, thankfully, we made it home safely.