The Bowl, The Vortex, Lower Sand Cove Hike

Chloe really likes to get out in nature, so sometimes on Saturday or Sunday we take a family hike. We like to look up interesting places to hike to on google. We had found one not to far out of St. George near Dammeron Valley, that looked pretty cool, called the Vortex. It is located at the Lower Sand Cove Trailhead. We read a post about it and thought it seemed easy enough so off we headed. We learned a few things along the way and will definitely try to be better informed before our next adventure. First off, we should have read more in depth about it. We were thinking that it would be a well marked trail and easy to find-it wasn't. In fact there were several people we passed or met along the way looking for the same thing with about as much success as we were having. Also one of the main sources we read about getting there said it was 2 miles round trip-that wasn't true it might have been closer to 2 miles one way and that quickly turned into a long hike, especially for our little guy. Once we got to the top, or end of the hike, and hadn't found what we were looking for we debated whether to just go home or keep looking. We decided to keep looking for a few more minutes. We got on our phones and found the google coordinates and put those in our google maps and after a little trial and error were able to use that to get us to our destination. 

 WE finally found it. Since it had been raining a lot the bottom of the hole was filled with water. It should have gone done a lot deeper. The sandstone was pretty slipper, so Chloe got a little bit scared when she went down and kept slipping towards the water and couldn't get traction to come back up the side. It was scary especially cause we didn't know how deep the water was, but probably pretty deep because we couldn't see the bottom. Landon and Tanner walked down and gave her a hand to get her footings and she easily came back up. Bryce and I didn't even attempt to walk down. It was pretty cool, but I would like to see it without water. 

Round trip I think it took us 2.5 hours and we probably hiked about 5 miles. The blogs we read said not recommend for young kids. That is probably true. For the most part Bryce was fine, we figured we could take him, because he is used to this type of stuff and is a hiker and climber. He did end up with a blister on his foot though and Landon and Tanner each carried him for a few minutes, but for the most part he did it on his own. 

#vortex