Red Mountain Traverse, Snow Canyon State Park

My favorite trails are always the ones with a challenge.   The first challenge of doing this trail was figuring out if it was possible.  I troll quite a few trail map Apps, and only one of them (onXBackcountry) even showed that this was doable.    So we did it.  

Karen and Limhi had stayed with Jim and I a couple of days in St. George after our night backpacking in Kolob Canyon.   As promised, the weather was warm and nice, and we did this hike in a T-shirt and shorts.  Amazing.  

Snow Canyon State Park, NW of St. George Utah, is a great place to visit and there are plenty of trails in the main park that are shorter and more scenic than this one.    To start, we dropped a car at the Toe Trail at the southern end of the plateau overlooking Snow Canyon to the West.  Then we drove through the park and exited the north end, parking at the Snow Canyon Overlook Trail.  Plenty of people were doing this shorter option, which was a rocky trail to an overlook at the north end of Snow Canyon.  It was spectacular.   We continued on, catching a few more glimpses of the valley below us.   

The route was supposed to be 11 miles total, mostly flatish but with a very steep descent to the car down a cliff.   About 4 miles in, the trail turned into deep sand, and looked like nothing more or less than a perfectly straight sand dune by the ocean.  Except we were on top of a plateau with a few scrubby cedar trees and a lot of rabbit tracks.    

When the dune ran out, so did any semblance of trail.  Soon we were down to just one set of fresh tracks in the sand, which the guys named after a prominent Mormon pioneer.   Weird or not, the tracks kept going mostly South, so we followed them.   We were soon off the recommended GPS track as well, but the top of the plateau wasn't terribly cliffy, so it didn't really matter.    It became a game to keep following the tracks through sand, rock and scrub.   It was a beautiful, desolate place, and I'm happy I had a GPS to show our location rather than relying just on a map and compass.  It's so easy to get off course with nothing to go by.  

We meandered through winding dry washes, over slickrock, and through more dunes.   Finally the cliff down came into view, along with more tracks and an actual trail leading down.  It was really steep, but rocks rather than scree, and I didn't hate it.   We finished at the car in 5 hours and almost exactly 11 miles, which Jim called a miracle.  He claims my mileage is usually underestimated.  I have no idea why he would say that!