KVIG Informative

Valley of Fire got its name sometime in the 1920s, when an unnamed AAA official reportedly looked at the park’s red sandstone at sunset and said it looked like it was on fire, according to Nevada State Parks’ official history of the site. A century later, the state park built to show off that landscape closes its own trails every summer because the same desert heat has become dangerous enough to warrant it.

Nevada State Parks’ history of Valley of Fire says people entered southern Nevada roughly 11,000 years ago. The Basketmaker culture carved petroglyphs into the park’s sandstone about 2,500 years ago, followed later by the Early Pueblo culture, according to the same history. Paiutes were living in the area by 1865, when Mormon settlers established the nearby community of St. Thomas, the history states.

A rough road built through the valley in 1912 connected to the Arrowhead Trail, the early automobile route linking Salt Lake City and Los Angeles, according to Nevada State Parks. It was sometime in the 1920s that the unnamed AAA official gave the valley the name it still carries.

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Nevada State Parks’ history says roughly 8,500 acres of federal public land were transferred to the state in the 1920s to create the original Valley of Fire tract. The Nevada State Historic Preservation Office’s historical marker for the site, Marker No. 150, places the transfer more specifically: a 1931 federal land exchange that handed the state 8,760 acres.

Civilian Conservation Corps crews began building the park’s first facilities and campgrounds in 1933, according to Nevada State Parks. The land was formally dedicated as Valley of Fire, Nevada’s first state park, on Easter Sunday 1934, according to both Nevada State Parks and the historical marker.

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The Nevada Legislature gave the park its legal designation the following year. Marker No. 150 says the 1935 Legislature established Valley of Fire alongside three other parks — Beaver Dam, Cathedral Gorge and Kershaw-Ryan — creating Nevada’s state park system in a single session. The marker credits the Civilian Conservation Corps’ work in the new parks to Thomas W. Miller of Reno, the system’s first State Parks Commission chairman.

The marker says the park had quadrupled in size by 2015; Nevada State Parks’ own page for the site now puts it at more than 40,000 acres, nearly five times the size of the original transfer.

That growth hasn’t changed the climate that gave the park its name. Nevada State Parks closed eight of Valley of Fire’s trails — Fire Wave, Seven Wonders Loop, Pastel Canyon Prospect, Arrowhead, Pinnacles, White Domes, Charlie Springs and Natural Arches — from May 15 through Oct. 1, 2025, citing extreme heat and hazardous conditions behind many of the park’s search-and-rescue calls. The park’s West Entrance has been closed four days a week since Aug. 3, 2026, for construction the agency says will continue through the end of the year. Nevada carved this park out of the desert to let people walk into a landscape a stranger once said looked like it was burning. Ninety-one years later, the state spends part of its own budget keeping people from finding out how literal that description has become.