Cottonwood-Harmon Trail

I was finally able to pry Jacqueline away from her school work on a Sunday so that we could go out and to a hike. I just bought this map for the Pine Valley Mountain Wilderness area, so that we wouldn't have to get lost there anymore. On the map, I found a trail that seemed interesting. So we drove up the eight mile dirt road, way far near the mountains. I was happy that we could make it all the way in my Ranger as you never know what condition a dirt road in Utah will be in. When we got to the trailhead, I thought that we were going to take the Oak Grove Trail to the Summit Trail and climb Signal Peak. 

It is 10,365 feet high and definitely a good hike for a weekend day. Instead, we followed the only discernible trail that we ran into that lead us to the Three Pine Creek trail. Well, obviously we were a little bit frustrated, but we got over it quickly and made the most of it. That trail ran into the Cottonwood-Harmon Trail. We took that out and stayed high on the ridge with views of Zion and the mountains above us. I tried out an interesting feature on my new camera that allows me to connect three pictures together for a panoramic view. It works well, but if you look closely, you can see that one area is doubled up in the picture. 

The views were great and the fall colors were definitely out. The frustrating part is that very few people ever walk the trail that we were on, so it was a bit brushy. It was difficult to find at
times, but we persevered to get a pretty good hike out of it.
Jacqueline was happy to see the fall colors that were definitely out at the elevation that we were at. We hit the end of our brushy trail and had to hack our way back. We were able to make a loop hike out of part of the hike and meet up with the road. The nice part about this area was that we did not meet a soul hiking that road and we were able to still enjoy the creek and the colors that were right next to us. We made it back to the car having taken about 5 hours to do a little less than 10 miles. The weather was so nice and the day was just a bit brisk making it a fine fall day to enjoy the mountains that we can see from our deck each day.