Mt Charleston is the highest mountain in Nevada, At 11, 700 ft it comes nowhere near it neighbor's highest: California's has  14, 500 ft Mt Whitney and Arizona's has 12,500 ft Mt Humphrey. It it is any consolation to Nevada, it easily exceeds mountain challenged New Jersey, whose High Point Peak reaches to 1800 ft.

When we left Yosemite we recovered from six days of tent camping by two nights in motels. Then, on our way to Las Vegas we thought we might camp again in Death Valley. That proved too uninviting, so we went straight on to Nevada. Mt Charleston is on the northwest outskirts of Las Vegas; our map showed there were a half dozen campsites and we thought of taking one before going into Sin Sity. But we didn't know how inviting that would be and, being late, we didn't feel confident of getting a campsite.

On the second point, we later learned we were right: campsites are all taken by early afternoon. On the first point we learned there wasn't much need for worry: the campsites are well space and have lots of trees. Not quite enough to give all the shade we wanted but still there was some.


After our two weeks in Las Vegas we didn't want to leave the area without seeing Mt Charleston. So we drove up hoping to get a camp site. We very easily did, at McWilliams Camp. We had our choice of about half the 40 sites. Once our tent was up we set out for a hike on the Bristlecone Trail which makes a six mile loop of the twin campgrounds, McWilliams and Dolomite.