October 4, 2019

Snow Canyon State Park

Hikers:   Mark & Lecia

We were in St. George to watch Landon run the marathon on Saturday and since we got there Friday afternoon we went to Snow Canyon for some hiking.  Neither Mark or I had ever been to Snow Canyon but we did some fun hikes.  One of the things I loved about the hiking trails was that they were well marked.  If it wasn't obvious where the trail went you would see a sign.

It didn't necessarily tell you the name of the trail but it let you know you were on the trail and at times that was really helpful.  Also the trails weren't crowded.  We did see other people but the further we got from the trail head the fewer people we saw.

Jenny's Canyon

This was a fun little hike, and I do mean little!  Only a half mile round trip.  Very family friendly.

You walk through sand.  At the end of the trail you can go left to a slot canyon and right to an overlook.

The small slot canyon is a fantastic reward for such a short hike.

This is a picture from the overlook.

The next hike was a combination of several trails: 

Petrified Dunes/Hidden Pinyon/West Canyon Road/Lava Flow Trail/Butterfly Trail

I don't know how far we went but we started out on the petrified dunes and that was an awesome place to walk and explore.  

We just walked along and then I noticed that there were these markers anchored in the rock and if you kept following them they eventually took you to the end of the rock. See the anchor with arrows in the next picture.  Well, if you look you can see one even further and so you know where to go.  I didn't even know if we could go down from this rock but there was a marker down there so we just kept going!

We went down from the rock, saw a trail sign and just kept going until we came to an overlook.  Then we backtracked a little took another trail for a short ways, Hidden Pinyon, that took us to the West Canyon Road that we could see from the overlook.   Lucky thing we had taken the map they gave us at the pay station.  Without it we couldn't have hiked the loop made up by all these trails.  Like I mentioned before, the trail markers were really helpful, but they didn't say what trail you were on.  

Interesting moss growing on some rocks.

After walking along the  West Canyon Road we finally came to the Lava Flow Trail.

We had to hike quite a ways on that trail before we came to the Lava Tubes.  We saw a couple of them.  One especially was quite impressive and I suppose people explore them but I am not sure how you get down there and we were happy to look at it from above.

We only saw a couple of the lava tubes before we turned onto the butterfly trail.  Maybe we missed some great things by not going all the way on the Lava Flow Trail, but our car was parked at the trail head to the butterfly trail.  It turned out to be an interesting trail through lava fields, and included going up some rock, and in an area with more vegetation we saw this cute rabbit!  He just sat there chewing while we looked at him.

Here's the map that we used to find the different trails and hike a loop.  We started at the parking lot for the petrified dunes and the butterfly trail head.

There is a variety of terrain we hiked through, even in the short distances we went.  All of them were quite sunny and we stopped a couple of times to empty sand from our shoes!