Last month, Virginia and I packed the Scamp trailer and drove north into Idaho. As a general rule, I only drive about 4 hours when I’m traveling for fun and vacation. Since we shouldn’t drive the Scamp over 60mph, that puts our range at 240 miles max. Knowing that we could just make it across the Utah/Idaho border, I started looking for someplace near Burley. We also maintain a growing bucket list of places we want to visit in the next 10 years. One of the main objectives is to visit all the National Parks in feasible driving range (we’re obviously not driving to the National Park of American Samoa, among a few others). Since there are no National Parks in Idaho, surprisingly, we are expanding our bucket list further to include National Monuments, National Historic Sites, National Recreation Areas, etc. While we may not make it to every National Wildlife Preserve and Bird Sanctuary, we’ll still see some amazing places tucked away in remote corners of our country. As I was scanning over my road atlas, I discovered an area called the City of Rocks National Reserve. It’s a recreation area of 14,407 acres sitting at about 6,200 feet elevation in south central Idaho.

City of Rocks has several subjects of interest that make it a destination worth exploring. Firstly, it is an important historical area where several pioneer trials converge, cross, and depart. Most notably, it is a section of the California trail. There are places where wagon ruts are still visible in the stone, as well as names signed in axel grease upon the granite rock towers. It was the pioneer immigrants that gave this area the descriptive label of City of Rocks.

Since the 1970’s City of Rocks has developed a growing reputation as one of the best rock-climbing regions in the west. People come from all over the world to climb an estimated 1000 routes. Virginia and I don’t climb, except on the rare occasion when our children take us on an adventure. Our kids work as canyoneering guides and they’ll take us out every now and then when they have the time.

City of Rocks has a great campground system. Instead of a large area set apart for camping, they have small groupings of sites strung along the road. The Reserve takes reservations for camping, but we took our chances and found a nice spot late in the day when we drove in. Access to the park is via a dirt road. We entered from the east, passing through the town of Almo. The next day we continued on through the park to the west and exited on the road through the town of Oakley. It was a beautiful drive through remote and rugged scenery. We bounced along on a graded dirt road for about 40 miles. It wasn’t unnecessarily rough, but it still rattled 6-8 interior screws loose in the Scamp. I’m still attempting to seat those screws better but find they work loose even on paved roads. I’m currently applying glue to the screws when I reset them. It seems to work on some, but not all.

Most of the images in this post were shot immediately from our campsite. I climbed a rock ridge to the rear of our site to capture the opening image, looking down into the “City”. All the images of the sunset were likewise made from our camp. The sunset seemed to last for a good hour. The sky lit up all around us.

The next morning, we hiked the Creekside Towers Trail that then connected to several other trails that looped through the narrow slots and along a gurgling stream. Down inside the cracks of the rocks, it was another world of lush growth, full of wildflowers, birds, and mammals. We felt that we had entered an oasis. On the way out of the reserve, we stopped at many of the historical markers and learned the history and geology of this beautiful off-the-beaten path in southern Idaho.