10/26 Ash Meadows - Part 1

Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge is about as far in the middle of nowhere as you can get. It is in Nevada, about 40 miles east of Death Valley and about 80 miles from Las Vegas.

You take a state road out of Pahrump, NV, and head west. You can see what the countryside looks like.

Then you turn north on a really rough dirt road for several miles. 

The first stop is Point of Rocks where you walk on a boardwalk, past a stream to the spring pool which feeds the spring.

The forestry service has done an excellent job with interpretive signs.

As you can see, the water is crystal clear.  What you cannot see in the photo, but I could see easily, are the tiny, very endangered fish that live here.

The four species of fish that live here are living fossils because they are remnants of populations that lived when the entire area was a sea millions of years ago.

This is Point of Rocks spring.

The sign shows how the native peoples used the rocks to pound the mesquite pods into a flour which they baked into a bread.  The next photo shows the holes formed by this pounding over centuries.