Desert Hideaway : Lake Mead Offers Outdoorsmen Wide Choice of Activities Ashore or Afloat

On a hot, cloudless morning on Lake Mead, Don Payne, shouting to be heard over the boat’s engine, pointed down to the white-water wake.

“Right under us, about 400 feet down, is old Fort Callville,” he said. “It was a U.S. Army base, back in the 1860s, when the only way you got to this area was by boat, on the Colorado River. By the time the lake started to cover it up, in the 1930s, the only standing parts left were the adobe walls of one barracks building.”

You wondered about old Fort Callville, down there somewhere, a place where old soldiers once sought shade from Nevada’s blazing summers. Somewhere, down there, it rests, lost in silent, icy darkness.

On top, it seems nothing is at rest. In every direction, boats buzz. In clear, desert air, Lake Mead is a brilliant splash of blue, a spidery desert waterway stretching for 100 miles from massive Hoover Dam at Black Canyon to Separation Rapids, generally thought of as the geographical dividing point between Mead and the Colorado River as it flows out of the Grand Canyon. On maps, Mead looks like an inverted T, drawn by a shaky hand.

Lake Mead country, to the first time visitor, might seem like a rocky wasteland. In summer, the place sizzles--up to 120 degrees. Locals say it really isn’t hot at Mead unless it’s over 100 at midnight.

But Mead hides more than it shows. Along its 500 miles of shoreline, boaters cruising the lake’s edges can find plenty of coves, bays, pockets and even a few sand or gravel beaches. In one of the last bays before you enter the Grand Canyon, there’s a sight to startle even the most grizzled of desert visitors--a shady spot with a real waterfall.

Payne and his friend, water-skier Don English, were showing friends some of Mead’s hidden, secluded areas, where boaters can beach a boat, put up a tent or simply take a snooze in some quiet shade.

As Lake Mead rose (the lake began to fill in 1935 and was filled by 1941), it eventually created thousands of little shoreline pockets and coves, enjoyed ever since by generations of visitors. And Mead has a lot of visitors. On a holiday weekend, crowd counts range from 300,000 to 400,000.

Getting lost, on Lake Mead. . . .

English reduced speed and his boat glided slowly into one of Mead’s major attractions, The Wishing Well, on the Arizona side. Here, a narrow canyon appears in the towering rock walls. In its shade, the temperature is about 20 degrees cooler. The great expanse of the lake had suddenly become a cool, twisting, narrow canal, about 25 feet across in the narrowest spots.

The cries of several species of desert birds echoed in the canyon. The waterway winds its way back into the desert for about a quarter-mile. At the end, in a wider pool, a couple had tied up their boat to have lunch in the shade and to do some semi-serious casting for largemouth bass.

Later, on the Nevada side, English visited another remote canyon, where on a weekday, a Mead boater might find solitude. It’s Boulder Wash, most easily reached by boat.

“See that road?” Payne said, pointing to a rough dirt track leading to the little beach. “That’s a tough road, really brutal, off North Shore Road. It’s about a two-mile drive.”

Two young men had backed their bass boat into the shallow water and were preparing to push off for some fishing. Some Mead visitors, English pointed out, never get to the water line.

“A lot of people come just for the rock climbing,” he said. “There are quite a few rough roads leading off the highways, and a lot of the prime rock walls for climbing are near the water.”

Another quiet, cool waterway, lying beneath 800-foot high rock walls, is James Bay, on the Arizona side. A lone sailboat lay at anchor, its occupants apparently climbing about in the nearby desert foothills.

Mead has numerous such hidden canyons, shady places where, on weekdays or some non-holiday weekends, complete desert solitude can be achieved. Just you and the birds, the wind, and the echoes. And there’s always the hope for a glimpse of some of Mead’s full-time residents, desert bighorn sheep.

English steered the boat through Iceberg Canyon, where a half-dozen striped bass fishermen were drift-fishing with cut anchovies--unsuccessfully, it appeared. Iceberg Canyon was named by a 19th-Century explorer who, while visiting uncharted Colorado River waters, thought the canyon’s north side rock formations resembled North Atlantic icebergs.

When the boat stopped, English pulled out his principal instrument of recreation, besides his boat--his water-skis.

He slipped on his life jacket and dropped over the stern. The cold water made him shudder, but it wasn’t cold enough to take the smile off his face. With Payne at the wheel, English was hauled quickly out of the water by a burst of acceleration. At about 25 m.p.h., he traversed back and forth across the boat’s wake.

Chilled after 10 minutes, he signaled for Payne to stop the boat, and let go of the tow rope.

“I’ve water-skied on Mead for the last 14 years,” he said, climbing into the boat and toweling off. “The knock on Mead is that it’s too windy too often. Well, my experience is that the wide open parts of the lake are too windy for skiing about 25% of the time. But it’s a big lake. You can almost always find some protected areas flat enough to ski.”

Big Sandy is a massive sand dune, about 100 feet high and extending for about a half-mile out into the lake from the Arizona side. It’s a popular beach camping area, and a half-dozen boaters had set up camps along the beaches.

Payne pointed to piles of driftwood along the shore.

“A lot of the driftwood you see on Mead’s shores have been bouncing around the lake since 1941, when the lake filled,” he said.

“In real windy periods, it can be a real hazard. I’ve seen driftwood so thick in Iceberg Canyon after a blow that you had to go through it at a snail’s pace for a half-mile or more.”

At Boundary Point, two fishermen were at anchor in a shallow area, striper fishing. About 50 yards away was a 30-foot high, needle-shaped rock that marks the beginning of the north-running boundary line for Arizona and Nevada. From the rock northward, the line runs 50 more miles, separating the two states. Then for another 350 miles, running all the way to Idaho, it separates Utah and Nevada.

The boat turned right, around a mountainous peninsula, and headed into Grand Canyon country.

One of the first sights greeting Grand Canyon visitors arriving by boat from Lake Mead is on the lake’s right side--a delicate waterfall, called Emery Falls by some, Columbine Falls by others. Just as Mead’s blue water begins to turn brown and the first detectable river current is observed, boaters see a thin waterfall descending about 60 feet, splashing onto a little Mead bay that’s shaded in the afternoon by a high rock wall.

Several boats are tied onto the rock wall, just inside the shade line.

The falls are the end of the line for a small creek up above, one that’s wound its way down from the snows of the high country, passing gnarled pinon pines, mesquite and desert brushlands . . . and then it tumbles into Lake Mead.

Up ahead, the towering reddish walls of the Grand Canyon. Always, Payne said, the spectacle takes him back to his youth, when little boats stayed closer to port.

“I’ve lived in Las Vegas most of my life, and in the old days, we never got this far up on the lake,” Payne said. “When I was a kid, the biggest outboard motor I ever heard of was a 22-horse. For fishing, we used to drive to Willow Beach (an Arizona trout fishing resort on the Colorado River, about 20 miles below Hoover Dam). In terms of recreation boating on Mead, anything beyond Iceberg Canyon was almost exploration.

“On a day like today, when we’ll go all the way to the Grand Canyon and back (to Callville Bay Marina), I have to stop and think that when I was a kid, this was unheard of.”