Idaho’s ‘silent city’ is popular in summer but offers snowshoeing solitude in winter
This is part of a series about making the most of an America the Beautiful parks pass in Idaho, a state with no national park of its own. Read more about the pass and past efforts to create a national park in Idaho here.
For centuries, Idaho’s City of Rocks has been a destination. It was part of the Shoshone and Paiute tribes’ territory originally, and in the 1800s became a landmark for travelers on the California Trail at the junction of the Salt Lake and California roads. Today it’s a must-visit for rock climbers who scale the preserve’s towering granite formations.
In the summer, hikers also flock to the park near the Utah border to hit the trails that wind through the alien landscape. But in the winter, City of Rocks is an equally fascinating spot, albeit one that’s a bit more difficult to traverse.
I headed out to City of Rocks in mid-February with my boyfriend, Max, as part of my effort to make the most of a national parks entrance pass. City of Rocks is one of seven sites in Idaho that are National Park Service “units.”
Among National Park Service properties, City of Rocks is unique. It’s technically a national reserve — one of only three in the country — because it combines federal, state and private land. When it was created in the late 1980s, the National Park Service and Idaho Department of Parks and Recreation managed the property jointly. Today, Parks and Rec manages the site.
First, I’ll say this trip wasn’t much of a victory as far as recouping the cost of the America the Beautiful parks pass, which offers free entry at National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management, Forest Service, Bureau of Reclamation and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers properties. You don’t need any kind of pass — state parks or otherwise — to visit City of Rocks for day use. Still, the chance to explore the park in relative winter solitude made the trip worthwhile.
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Exploring Idaho’s City of Rocks on snowshoes
City of Rocks is about a 3-hour drive from Boise, so Max and I stayed overnight in Almo, which is a stone’s throw from the park entrance. We woke up on a Saturday to sunny weather and slight wind and headed to the visitor center, 3035 S. Elba Almo Road, where an employee let us know we’d need snowshoes if we planned to get around. (Snowshoes are available to rent at the visitor center for $10.)
From the visitor center, it’s about a 10-minute drive to the park entrance, much of it on a dirt road that’s just wide enough for two vehicles thanks to snowbanks on either side. If you go when there’s snow, you’ll want to take a vehicle with high clearance and, if possible, four-wheel drive. At the east entrance, there wasn’t much snow on the ground — which made me wonder if we’d wasted money on those snowshoes. We took some time to walk around Camp Rock and marvel at the names and messages emigrants left in axle grease or etched into rock.
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As we drove farther into the park, the snow got deeper and deeper. The road that runs through the park from Almo to Oakley isn’t maintained in the winter— as noted by several road signs as you drive in — so turnoffs to popular sites like Window Arch were buried under nearly 2 feet of snow. Undeterred, we drove on and quickly found our options limited. Just after Bath Rock, about 2 miles past Camp Rock, the road was completely snowed over.
We parked across the road from Bath Rock at the turnout for Creekside Towers Trail, which was cleared. We strapped on our snowshoes and headed east on the unbroken snow to see more of the park. Most of the snow had a frozen layer of crust on top that made for a perfect surface to dig crampons into.
Max and I crunched into a valley where huge blue icicles hung from the surrounding walls. Over the trees we could see Flaming Rock, a monolith streaked with reddish-orange iron oxide. We tried to continue east through the valley toward Window Arch but quickly found ourselves in deep powder where even the snowshoes didn’t help. We hiked back toward the road and snowshoed to the Window Arch parking area.
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When there’s no snow on the ground, Window Arch is a short 300 feet from parking. But with a blanket of white obscuring signs and trails, it was a bit more challenging — and more fun — to find the landmarks. We had the entire park nearly to ourselves for several hours to explore out-of-bounds.
There are a few trails that were still clear in the deep snow. After returning to our car, we snowshoed along Creekside Towers Trail, which mercifully had been broken by snowshoers and sledders before us. After a few miles, we headed back into town to return our snowshoes and warm up in nearby Durfee Hot Springs.
We’ll likely be back when the weather warms to see the parts of the park that were inaccessible. The snow kept us from other iconic rocks like the Breadloaves, King on the Throne and the Geowatts. But with the snow insulating the landscape and keeping crowds at bay, we didn’t feel we missed out on the park at all. Instead, we got to experience the stillness of what explorers once called “the silent city.”
