Some of Rei's friends are in the habit of going hiking on Sunday mornings, and that suited me just fine on the Sunday that I was visiting. I had wanted to go up to Mud Wash Narrows, hike the four mile canyon then camp overnight beachside along the far northeastern shores of Lake Mead's Overton Arm, then get up the next day and drive up to Zion. Unfortunately, the threat of rain prevented that. Instead we drove back over to Red Rock Canyon, where there was also precipitation but in the form of snow.

The White Rock Loop trail is about halfway along the scenic loop road through the park. It is a 6 mile hike around the sandstone hills of White Rock. There are two parking lots for the trail, and we parked at the lower one, which added an extra mile to our hike.

On the trip over, we could see that the mountains were eveloped in clouds and fog. When we got closer, we could see the snow on the high peaks. We got out and played around a bit in the desert snow.

Some weird photo Rei's camera took of me.

Turtlehead with snow. The face of the peak is too steep for snow to stick.

The snow didn't pile up much, just a thin dusting. It slacked off about 30 minutes after we arrived, but continue to fall sporadically for the next couple of hours.

The clouds breaking up over Bridge Mountain, part of the wall of sandstone on the south side of the park.

The journey along the White Rock Loop trail begins with me in the lead. The trail was mostly easy to follow, except about one and half miles in we kinda lost it in the scrub. Part of the group decided to try to scale the mountain and find the trail on the other side. The sane ones, me included, continued heading in the right direction until we found the trail again.

Near the half-way point along the trail, after rounding the south end of the White Rock Hills, the trail is much wider and covered in gravel for a mile or so. Despite snow earlier in the day, it had warmed up a bit, and with the heat of the excercise, it ws quite comfortable to take off my jacket and be in short sleeves.

The big white rock for which the hills are named. They're a bit more rugged and weatherworn than Calico Hills which are a couple of miles away.

This is the kind of rock half of the group tried to climb over. We lost contact with them until we reached the end of the trail, where one of them waited in failure. The others showed up a couple hours later after deciding they couldn't make it over the top.

Though the park is full of white tourist now, it used to be home to a group of Southern Paiute native Americans. One of them decided to leave his handprints on White Rock.

Near the end of the trail, as your come back around the north end of the White Rock Hills, you get an excellent view of the north side of the park. Turtlehead dominates the skyline on the left, and to the right is Calico Hills, then on the far right the edge of Blue Diamond Hill.

The seven mile loop took us about three hours.