Red Bluff

With a Monday off for President's Day, we asked Tom if he would be interested in doing a hike on short notice.  After bouncing around several different possibilities, we suggested that Tom might be interested in Seegmiller Peak in Arizona.  (We had been there "many moons ago")  Tom was "in" and quickly pulled up his topo map and planned a ridge route that would take us from Seegmiller Peak to the Red Bluff Benchmark.  That seemed to tick the boxes for all of us - Tom would get two peaks and a benchmark and we would get a fun hike to a seldom visited bluff on the Arizona Strip.

 We are standing on Seegmiller Peak in Arizona (you can drive to the top)
and are looking north towards St. George, Hurricane and Zion (all off in the distance)

We came upon this sinkhole . . . thankfully none of the dogs were interested in it!

Chipper wasn't too sure about the large volcanic boulders . . . he needed a little coaxing

Red Bluff was quite a surprise . . .  It looks like any other tree covered mountain from the road! 

Here's a closer look at some of the interesting geologic formations on Red Bluff

Looking back toward Seegmiller Peak where we began our hike
(Seegmiller is the rounded knob in the middle of the picture)

Red Bluff Benchmark (1953) along with pieces of the old wooden survey tripod
Tom & Kent are searching for the survey markers . . . they could only find one of two
Tom will make this notation when he submits updates for the benchmark

We enjoyed a nice lunch break before heading back down
(Looking east towards the Hurricane Cliffs)

What started out to be just a hike to give the dogs some exercise,
turned into a really fun day full of new discoveries!

Our route ended up taking us about 5.5 miles.  On the way back, we cut over to walk a portion of the road to Seegmiller Peak in order to avoid returning along the lava rock lined ridge.  For a topo map and gps track of our hike, click here to read Tom's Peakbagger post on Red Bluff BM.