Valley of Fire State Park, Nevada, USA

James Riddle and I went on tour to the Valley of Fire State Park, Nevada. His keen eye spotted movement soon after we entered the park. We spotted a small herd of Rocky mountain big horn sheep in the mountains. These are wild animals which feed on the desert vegetation.

These sheep species are believed to have migrated from Siberia some 750,000 years ago when the Bering Land Bridge connected the continents of Asia and North America at Alaska.

In the video below, you can see these sheep feeding on desert vegetation.



The video is a bit shaky because I had to shoot at 20x optical zoom without a tripod with my Canon PowerShot SX10 digital camera. The quality of the video was much better before Google compressed it for this blog.

These sheep feed on the small poodles of water - as James explains in the video - that collect on hollow rocks in the desert mountains. These are the only sources of water in the otherwise barren land. You can see the big-horn sheep drinking water from a small poodle in this video:



We were following the White Domes trail in the Valley of Fire State park. The canyon walls slowly started to close-in on us until there was just a foot of gap between the two walls. This geological feature, as James explains in the video is called a slot canyon.



Here's a picture of the slot canyon:
There were numerous cavities and holes in the rocks caused by millions of years of erosion. This video has been shot from one of these holes.



This picture gives you a better idea of the place from where I took the video: