Last week I went to Las Vegas to visit one of my long time art patrons who lives there. Over the 4 years or so he's been collecting my art, we've become friends, and he invited me to come visit him and his wife. I was so excited to finally make it happen! I was supposed to go in April, but the day before my flight, I ended up in the hospital with excruciating pain from a pinched nerve, and I wasn't able to fly.
It was so awesome to see all these paintings again, he owns some of my personal favorites lol
The first day I was there we went over to Red Rock Canyon, about 30 minuets outside the city. It's a beautiful place, with cool looking rock formations. It was exhausting to hike around in the heat though, so I didn't take many pictures lol
Then the next day we went to the Clark County Museum in Henderson. It's got everything from natural history on display to entire fully furnished buildings from different eras. One of my favorite things on display was an awesome collection of Kachina dolls. They represent different Gods and aspects of nature that are sacred to the Hopi Indians that lived (and still live) in the area.
One of the highlights of my trip was getting to meet the director of the museum - Mark Hall-Patton. You may recognize him as "The Beard Of Knowledge" who authenticates historic items on History channel's "Pawn Stars". He actually spent almost an hour chatting with us, and gave us a behind the scenes tour of the museum's reference library, some items that were not on display, and his office.You can tell how passionate he is about his work, he lit up and got excited to answer questions about the many things he had on display in his office.
Then we went to a place called "The Wash". It's a protected wetland area just next to Las Vegas. We saw frogs and crayfish and hummingbirds, but they all moved too fast, or were too far away to get good pictures of. I did get a pretty good picture of this pink desert willow flower. They can only grow where it's a little wetter than the surrounding desert.
Over the next few days we went to some other beautiful scenic spots, went hiking to some petroglyphs, and went to a couple more museums. Stay tuned for that post in another few days! -Adam
