A little south of Twin Falls is some federally owned lands held in reserve. This area is called City of Rocks. It’s a bit of a popular local tourist location and highly popular for camping. I decided that it was time for me to check this area of Idaho out for myself after hearing rumors about it for years. Here’s a little of what I found.
It was a cloudy and somewhat nasty day when we set out for the drive. We passed and passed through a few areas of rain on the way. Thankfully the park did not have rain, or this would have been a truly miserable day. I could tell there had been fresh rain though. The dirt roads were wet.
City of Rocks is nestled inside a canyon area. This means that it can be difficult to see just what you are looking for until you are right on it. The landscape was pretty but boring on the way in and then, BAM. You see the “city” there in front of you. You suddenly understand the name for the place.
City of Rocks is such a large area that it’s not a place you hike through if you want to see it all. It’s a place you drive through and there are plenty of roads to service that. If you want to do some hiking, there are several trails which you can check out and several points of interest labeled on the road as you drive by.
If you’re into climbing, there are several sizable rock formations which are popular for climbing and repelling. They have options for all levels of climbers. Not being climbers ourselves, we decided to check out a couple of the local points of interest and a couple of the trails instead.
Camp rock was our first stop. It was interesting to see the old signatures made out of ashes left by pioneers of the California trail in the mid to late 1800’s. Sadly, they are fading away. Many of the fringe signatures clearly visible in the 1930’s photo display are all but gone today.
We also checked out the “window arch,” a natural hole in a rock formation on top of a cliff. I went to all the trouble of free climbing up the front of the window for a view only to get into the window and see there was a much easier way up there around back. It figures. However, it made my decent much easier to do.
We also took a tour around Bath rock. It supposedly has a natural bathtub-shaped depression on top of the behemoth sized rock. I don’t know for sure. I didn’t climb up there to find out. There were several teenagers up there flying kites though.
We made a nice loop of the park area and scouted out the places to be at sunset. I had a couple of them, so we had to make it fast between the two. Fortunately, they weren’t very far apart.
City of Rocks was an interesting excursion, one that yielded some photographs for the portfolio. There’s so much more there to see and we didn’t have time for it all. It’ll be worth another trip again someday.
