Urban Hiker Girl: Utah Hiker Girl

It's official, the UGH is now a Utah Hiker Girl!

Author: Mike Matson, no relation

Today I got a book in the mail from a lady whom I used to dog-sit for in Seattle. It was such a sweet surprise. The book was about hikes in the Salt Lake City area. (My roommate and I had been looking at a similar book in Costco just the other day. Funny enough, the author has the same name as my brother, but it's not written by him- at least that I know of.)
My roommate flipped though the book and found an easy hike close by. As we were returning home from some errands she suggested we try one after dinner. Since it was getting on in the day we decided to grab dinner on our way to the trail head (Chik-fil-A!). We were looking for Rocky Mouth Canyon, it's a 0.7 mile round-trip "family stroll" with a 262 foot gain.
I programmed it into the GPS and we were off. The guide book said that though the trail head is in a residential neighborhood, do not park on the street only park in the parking at the trail head, so when we saw a sign for a trail head we turned off.
We found an unpaved parking area near a trail head and got out of the car. That's when we noticed that neither of the trail head signs indicated the trail we were looking for. We said "oh well," choose one, and headed out.

It started out smoothly with a nice view of the mountains and the Wasatch Valley. We came to what appeared to be the end with a little bench, only to discover a sandy trail down the steep hillside. We paused to take pictures and then kept going, gathering a lot of dust in our shoes.

We ended up hiking 2.15 miles down and up some steep hillsides. We encountered five horse riders and one man and his dog- twice. We took that as a good sign that the trail circled around so we could get back to our car a different way than the path we came on.
All in all it was a beautiful trail and a great workout. Not the family stroll with a waterfall at the end that we had planned, but we'll go look for that tomorrow afternoon. Stay tuned for more adventures of the UTAH Hiker Girl!