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It's safe to say that most people visiting Valley of Fire State Park in Nevada are not there to see the bathrooms. I wasn't there to see the bathrooms either, I was there to see the red sandstone formations and the sweeping desert landscapes — or, more accurately, I was in search of an antidote to Las Vegas. Finding out en route that Valley of Fire was where they filmed Captain Kirk's death scene in Star Trek Generations was nerd-icing on the cake. Had I been there earlier in the year, the nerd factor would have been even higher, as I would have been on the lookout for the rare Golden bearclaw poppy, Arctomecon californica, which despite the name has never been found in California. Red rocks, Vegas remedy, Shatner, and rare misnamed poppies, but not bathrooms — after all, who goes out to the desert, much less anywhere else, to look at bathrooms?

But when confronted with a bathroom like this, how can you not take notice?



The bathroom is small inside, but on the plus side the men's room has a pair of unusual Art Deco urinals that look like oversized athletic cups on raised pedestals (an example here). Oddly, they're free-standing and without any sort of stall wall, so anyone entering the bathroom gets treated to a straight-on view of someone peeing (I guess men were less pee-shy back in the days of the Hoover administration).


For me, there's no comparison between the crowded superficial tawdriness of Vegas and the vast beautiful terrain that surrounds it, but most people come to Vegas to gamble, drink, see a few shows, and never even think of setting foot off the Strip, much less driving an hour outside the city. No bathroom inside a hotel shaped like a cheap replica of the Chrysler Building can compare to the ones at Valley of Fire, no matter how glitzy. To put this in poker terms so the gamblers can understand, Vegas is a full house, but the Nevada desert is a royal flush.