The Cliffs of Red

Almost 5 years ago we made our first trip to Red Rock Canyon outside of St. George, I guess more along the lines of LaVerkin if I have my geography right.  Anyhow, we have been back a few times and today we made another trip.  Natalie is still in California so it was just the boys and I.  It was a busy day there with a lot of people visiting the park.  They have also made some improvements which meant we could no longer drive down through the creek on our way in.  Nope, nice new bridge in place both at the entrance and up in the park.  There was also a guard shack of sorts.  It was manned by two ladies one of which welcomed us and went through a little pamphlet with us.  She mentioned the dinosaur tracks... wait, what?  That was new.  We had to go and check those out.  They were actually just off one of the trails we had hiked before.  It was cool to see these trace fossils.  We got back on the Silver Reef trail after checking the tracks out and low and behold there was another sign post indicating additional trace fossils.  These ones were actually right in the middle of the trail where we had walked on our first visit almost 5 years ago with Jay and Sara and fam.  It was pretty cool.  As I am taking this dinosaur class right now I found it kind of fascinating.  I also found myself looking at sedimentary structures and other geological events and wondering what transpired over the millions of previous years to get us where we are now.  Interesting things to consider.  We made our way up the trail to the waterfalls and had fun there.  We didn't get passed the last of the pool areas as there was a host of people there and the boys really wanted to play in the water.  I let them.  Jack eventually made his way to an area where people jump into the pool and, he jumped.  It was great.  We had a lot of fun out there.  I think Red Cliffs is a great little hike with some amazing scenery and fun things to do.  I still want to get up passed that pool and further back to where I can follow the creek way back.  My buddy tells me there is a trail that loops back around and there are some skinny passes to get through with the water snaking down through these rocks.  One of these days I need to get back up in there.  Maybe in a couple years the boys will be poised to do that though I might need to get back there a little sooner then that.  The cliffs of red are a lot of fun, highly recommended.