Valley of Fire State Park

This guide to Valley of Fire State Park near Las Vegas follows a Southern Paiute man the settlers called Little Mouse, who hid in this sandstone maze in the 1890s, wanted by some accounts for killing two prospectors and, by others, fleeing a posse that had already decided his guilt. It traces the hidden water tank that kept him going in a desert where the next reliable source might be a day's walk off, and the petroglyphs pecked into the canyon walls by people who lived here long before him. Walk the sandy wash toward the tank and you're tracing the same route he once used to disappear into this rock.