Secret Hike to Johnson's Arch

Sue and I went on a very interesting hike above Snow Canyon on Saturday with some of Sue's co-workers at SWUPHD...or "swooped" for short. Lisa, and RN from work and our appointed hiking guide for the day took us to this awesome un-chartered hike that traverses through scrub and slick rock high above Snow Canyon. She found out about this hike years ago for a colleague from the state health department who swore her to secrecy in order to protect the sometimes fragile eco-environment that lives and thrives here.

The hike was moderately difficult with lots of ups and downs with very little in the forms of actual trails. Almost 100% of the hike was basically in the back country. It started out high above the East side of Snow Canyon. Our efforts paid off with two very nice petroglyph sites that very few people know about. They were nothing like what we took everyone to see in Ivins, but, they were easily worth seeing. It is actually believed that these two sites were not the typical 1000 year old petroglyphs, but actually believe they have been dated back 3000 years....now that's pretty cool.

While the Petroglyphs were awesome, the real treat was when we ventured alomost all the way to the East Snow Canyon rim. We actually came out on top of large slot canyon looking down towards Johnson's arch, with the city of Santa Clara and Ivins in the background. We could barely see the top of the arch from our perch, but we were basically eating lunch almost on a ledge high above the canyon floor. In addition, we also found a way to hike to Johnson's arch from the canyon floor....Sounds like a new adventure is awaiting us in a couple of weeks.

This was our first real group hike and the people from "swooped" are really great people, who we really enjoyed getting to know and spending a few hours with. We will definitely being going with them again and we offered to be the hiking guides next time with maybe a trip to "Taylor's Wash" in store in the Kolob fingers area West of Zion National Park

Here's a few photos to enjoy and tempt your senses. The photos are great but they really don't show you how truly magnificent this hike really was. 

 The Girls from "SWUPHD" aka... "The Super Women of the Utah Public Health Department"

Until next time.....Happy Trails to You!