Snow Canyon State Park

Water Canyon

Lambs Knoll Canyon

Zion National Park

Bryce Canyon National Park

Valley of Fire State Park

See? Trails are just a state of mind out here....

So much sand.... it's like the glitter of the natural world?

First stop/hike on our trip to Southern Utah (via Vegas, so things in SE Nevada are totally fair game) was Valley of Fire State Park. A quick scan of the map did not yield a loop hike in the 3-5 mile range, so we consulted our old friend/nemesis AllTrails and found a lovely figure 8 that was built out of 2 of the more popular hikes in the park. Seemed pretty ideal?

Lesson #1: just because a group appears to have been coming from where you think you are going on a loop, don't trust them... especially when they say things like "I thought this was only a mile, we've walked more than 2 miles now..." etc. Suffice to say, we parted ways with the slightly more formal trail (it's really just a bunch of rocks, what even is a trail??) and in an attempt to get back onto what we thought was the trail we ended up at a nice picnic area (with pit toilets, which are EVERYWHERE around here!) and took the opportunity for some lunch. At this point, we were able to get back on some actual trails, but then our figure 8 ended up more like a Möbius strip and we walked the same chunk of trail 3 or 4 times in the service of getting to all the other parts of our loop-de-loo.

Playing Hooky

Somehow we made it to early March with 2 unused lift tickets to Wintergreen AND said mountain still 100% open. So, naturally the only thing to do in this instance is to take a literal snow day and go play on the mountain. As we should, and so we did.