Cinder Cone

 Near Snow Canyon and right along the road there is a cinder cone that is obvious. I wondered if there was a trail up it and it turned out that there was. I decided that this must be hiked. I researched to see if my family could do it and it seemed like they could, so we set out to accomplish the task. On this day, we even used a weekend rather than a day after school to do the hike. Since it was Sunday in Utah, though, in the morning especially, we had the whole thing to ourselves. 

Sort of an advantage there to not be a member of the same church as a majority of the population, but there were other disadvantages also, though I am sure at this point most of their meetings were happening in an online setting. Getting to the trailhead was easy, though we drove right by it the first time because we weren't quite sure where to park. The parking ended up being right next to the road and the trailhead left from there. There were two choices of trails. One was very steep that charged right up to the top of the crater. The one that we were going to take was much more gradual. It skirted around the backside of the cinder cone.

At first it was not too steep, but then it began to charge up the talus. We went through a few cattle grates and then eventually were charging up the hill. This hike was pretty short as we could see the whole hike from where we started, but it turned out to be awesome. The kids did great and when we topped out at the high point on top of the Cinder Cone, we had sweeping views of the whole area. Especially awesome was the view of Snow Canyon. We could also see into Diamond Valley and over into Red Cliffs. We took a bunch of pictures, then the kids and the wife hung out while I scurried down into the crater. 

The route went around the crater before charging straight down. There wasn't much to see except for a bunch of stacked rocks. This was definitely an extinct volcano. I made it back to the wife and kids, then it was time to go down. We held hands on the way down due to the suggestion of the wife, but the kids handled it with ease. They were great hikers even if they did complain about having to go on hikes, they always did great when they were out there. It was an easy downhill walk back to the car with the whole hike taking only about an hour. Then it was back to home to our forced quarantine to ponder our future. Southern Utah was amazing, but we were really leaning toward a return to Oregon. We would have to get rehired at our old jobs, but it was looking more and more likely.