Monday, June 18, 2018

Our Time in Hurricane, UT

Posted from near North Ogden, UT

(Click on Pics to Enlarge)

To View additional pictures click on the links below:

Snow Canyon State Park
Owens Loop Trail
Turtle Wall Trail


I seemed to have managed to get way behind in my blog posting again.  We just spent a week in Kodachrome Basin SP near Cannonville, UT. Beautiful place, but no cell signal whatsoever.

We spent an entire month in Hurricane, UT, staying at WillowWind RV Park. We stayed at this same park in May, 2017 because of its' location to Zion National Park and to St. George, UT. It's about 25  and 18 miles, respectively. Hurricane is a great small town and you can find just about anything you need in St. George.

As most of our readers know by now, we love to hike trails in new areas we travel.  This area is a hiker's paradise.  I'm not going to talk about "all" of our hikes, just a bunch of them.

On the north side of St. George is a beautiful Utah State Park named Snow Canyon. The single day entrance fee is $6/day/car.  None of the hikes in this park are that long or difficult, but the scenery is beautiful. One of the first trails we hiked was named Petrified Dunes. The dunes looked like sand, but were sandstone.

The landscape is this area is amazing.

Careful there Karen!

Our next hike (on the same day) was the Lava Flow Trail. Unfortunately, none of my photos do true justice to this area.  The entire dark area in this photo is an ancient lava flow field.

There are a couple of lava tubes to explore on this hike, also.

A very short hike was on a trail named Pioneer Names.  A short climb up some rock led to an area where pioneers from the 1880s and 1890s left their marks on the stone using axle grease.

Here's a closer look at some of their names.

A few days later we drove back to St. George to hike a trail named Owen's Loop which provided great views of St. George below. (This trail is not located in Snow Canyon SP). The trail provided a nice combination of rock scrambling, easy walking, interesting rock formations, and cliff views.

Here's a look down onto St. George near the beginning of the trail. Mormon Temple on the right side.

I thought this rock formation was interesting. It reminded me of a spaceship, but I'm thinking its' formation was not quite so exotic.

We always try and stop for a "lunch" break about midway on our hikes. Although it really wasn't that hot today, this formation provided a great rest stop.

The first couple of days in June we visited an area (again on the north side of St. George) named the Red Cliffs Desert Reserve.  This is a very large area, but we chose a hike named Turtle Wall. We finally got to a trailhead in the morning hours. Again, great landscapes.

This trail was a large loop trail. Karen is actually standing on the "turtle" back. As such, we got no good photo of the turtle rock formation.

Taking a break for a picture!



















I have intentionally limited the number of photos in this post to keep the blog manageable to read. Believe me, there are many, many more photos to view.  If you are interested, please click on one of the links at the beginning of this post.



Our next blog post will focus on our trip to Cedar Breaks National Monument and a hike or two in Zion National Park. (We visited Zion last year, so our blogging on the park will we kept to a minimum.)



Thanks for stopping by to take a look!


8 comments:

  1. That's a great area, thanks for refreshing my memory.

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  2. This makes me want to go back to that area!

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  3. Looks really hot, but it is here as well. I believe I would have spent my time under that rock sipping water and watching you walk :-)

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    1. It really wasn't that bad, but I could have taken a short nap.

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  4. I love southern Utah and hope to spend more time exploring it. Thanks for the info on the RV Park. I hear ya on all the photos. When you're amongst such stunning landscape, it's hard to not keep clicking away and then there's the issue of which photos to share … fun!

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    1. Ingrid we take a bunch of pictures, but I'm making a conscious effort to not overload the blog posts. If folks are really interested in seeing a lot more about the area, I'm including links at the beginning of each blog. I figure that they can click or not click.

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  5. Staying on top of the blog is an eternal challenge that I am familiar with. I am also behind again ... sigh. Beautiful red rock country. Our time in Utah this year will be in the SLC area only, so these beautiful places are going to have wait until another time.

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    1. We really enjoy Utah. We've saved some spots for future visits!

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