Although most of the mountains in North America also face north and south, these are different. Friction between Atlantic and Pacific tectonic plates pushed the other American mountains upward, like a carpet being pushed against a wall. But these Nevada mountains are the scars of stretching between those plates - like the indentations made when you stretch a piece of cellophane.

That all of this was once a muddy sea-bottom has yielded cathedrals of sediment where there are no mountains, like the great Panaca formation seventy-five miles from here. The Panaca is a loose scar of mud so cursed by time and water that it has formed towers, pinnacles and peaks of dried sediment. The sharp erosion has produced such narrow troughs that it has formed winding cave-like passages - dark, cool, with a distinct hue of blue. Rather out of this world, if not moonlike. Like the strange formations in Red Rock Canyon, west of Las Vegas, or the odd elephantine structures of the Valley of Fire along Lake Mead, all of Southern Nevada seems an appropriate place for the imagination.