Mustang Pass

 I will be honest about this one. When I looked at it on the map, it didn't seem that exciting. Actually putting boots on the ground, or hikng shoes more accurately, it turned out to be a rather nice hike. We started out immediately after work. It was like watching a countdown clock as we only had to work until noon. Then it was grab your backpacks, let get out the door. It left us to hike in the afternoon heat, but so far it had not been too hot in Southern Utah. On this day, we even had some overcast conditions. I had been running out in this area when I was training for the half marathon, so I thought this could be a good area to explore. We started by driving up the Mill Creek Rd. This was another dirt road which turned out to be in fairly good shape. The trailhead had a few cars, but since this was the trailhead for Elephant Arch, we figured that there wasn't much to worry about the trail being too busy. It was still a concern for us since we did not know a lot about coronavirus except that people seemed to be dying quite frequently. 

The Mill Creek trail headed out from here which we followed. It was just an old dirt road and you could tell. We followed that until the junction with the Mustang Pass Trail. As soon as we turned off, we felt like we were actually on a trail. With the overcast conditions, it was very pleasant. We immediately encountered a big bull snake. This looks just like a rattle snake without the venomous bite. We left it alone and let it have its space. With the kids, we sometimes play a game where different animal sighting are worth different point values. The first one to see them gets the points. This was definitely a 15-pointer as the snake was massive. 

The sweeping views were awesome and everyone was having a great time. Jacqueline was excited about all the flowers that were out and the kids were interested in the various large cacti around. The trail continued to climb toward the volcanic buttes and we were headed right in between them. It had the feel of hiking to a mountain lake without the big trees and such. Still there was the anticipation of questioning what we would see on the other side of the pass. What we saw was a big open valley. 

It seemed like a great place to have a reservoir and it sounded like that was the original goal of the settlers in the early days. All of these trails and roads in Red Cliffs had some sort of history with the development of St. George. Once we topped out on the pass, it was downhill back to the car through a boulder field with many volcanic boulders. The whole hike was only 5-6  miles but it was very pleasant on a perfect day to be outside. Now it was back to the house for our forced confinement.