Gila Trail - Snow Canyon

Saturday, February 5, 2022 

Hike #13 of 2022.  5.0 miles / 57.0 miles YTD

This trail is technically part of Snow Canyon State Park but it can be accessed from outside the park (by parking along the highway). AllTrails led us to a trailhead that was actually private property but the landowners were nice enough to not just have a "private property, no trespassing" sign but actually had a legitimate sign made (not just a piece of paper) providing directions for how to access the trail properly (by parking on the side of the highway).
Our goal on this one was to see some petroglyphs. However, there was a very large family with some loud and rowdy kids in the area when we got to it so we decided to take the trail the long way around and see the petroglyphs at the end. Well, we ended up getting off track some (even with the help of AllTrails) and the petroglyphs ended up being rather hard to get to in some places, especially with Summit. We had already gotten a late start on this one so, by the time we got to the petroglyphs and then realized it was going to take some effort to get to all of them, we decided we would have to come back another day to see the rest (note that we went back on March 5....and actually found that we had already in fact gotten to all the hardest parts).

These were out in the open and easy to get to.


These were inside a slot canyon that took a little maneuvering to get down into. Eventually we got to a point that had a drop off that was too high to do with Summit but we could see a lot of footprints down below. So we assumed there would be a lot more petroglyphs by the footprints. However, it was getting too late in the day to attempt to go back and approach it from the other side.

However, when we returned on March 5, we found out that it was very likely that the footprints were from people that had approached it from the opposite way and ran into a wall that was too high to get up. When we came in from that way on our next attempt, there weren't any below the drop off. However, we did find some others in a different area (where I had noted that we got off track this time) that would have been easy to get to as well, had we known they were there.



Since we ended this one so late in the day, we were blessed with some beautiful sunset photos!




We asked a lot of Summit on this one, as far as going into tight spaces and jumping up and down a lot and she did amazing! She is such a great adventure partner!




This was another really narrow slot canyon with a lot of petroglyphs all on one side. They were kind of hard to see though so I don't have any photos of them.



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