City of Rocks National Reserve, Idaho, United States
Over the years I’ve been trying to visit lesser known units
of the national park system, especially in years when I’ve purchased an annual
pass for all federal lands. Southern
Idaho has a couple of these I was rather clueless about until I started
researching this trip, remote spots with rather low visitation. One of those is City of Rocks National
Reserve in the south-central part of the state just north of where Idaho, Utah,
and Nevada meet. Maybe it has something to do with having national reserve
status rather than national park or monument status, but I had heard very
little about it.
To get there, I took I-86 and I-84 to an exit from I-84
between Pocatello and Twin Falls and then drove south about 40 miles on scenic Route
77 through undulating sagebrush-covered hills and a few low mountain passes.
Wow, there’s even a small ski area named Pomerelle in the Albion Range in
Sawtooth National Forest! The scenery is
classic Great Basin desert and range country with isolated ranches anda few
small towns like Declo, Albion, and Almo.
City of Rocks significance is historical as well as scenic
and geological. The area of upright and weirdly-shaped rock outcrops was an important
milestone on the California Trail in the mid-1800s. The trail branched
southwestward from the Oregon Trail and passed through some of the rock
formations. They say that overall about 400,000 settlers traveled overland on
the trails westward during the 1840s to early 1860s and possibly over 100,000
passed through the area on the California Trail. They left significant amounts of graffiti,
much of it their own names, written in axel grease on some of the prominent
rocks like Camp Rock, Treasure Rock, and Register Rock along the way, some of
which can still be seen today but are fading gradually.
Castle Rocks State Park is located near the reserve and
contains similar formations. I went there first for a short two-mile loop hike
on the Backyard Boulders Trail around Castle Rock, one of the most prominent
formations. I’m not a rock climber, which may partly explain why I hadn’t heard
much about the area.
Castle Rock along with City of Rocks is a very popular
climbing destination, and I was amazed by how many people there were in the
very remote location, most there for climbing rather than hiking.
The trail was nice and quite easy, although better light
would have been nice to accentuate the rocks.
Things quickly turned miserable, though, for me and stayed that way. There’s something that there’s a lot of in
some parts of Idaho that’s not present in my part of Montana, sagebrush I
suspect, that I seem to be very allergic to. My eyes were soon red and itchy,
my nose running, and my violent sneezing uncontrollable. I took a Benadryl when I got back to the car,
but it seemed to take a while before I experienced the full effects. Those were accompanied by drowsiness, so the
relatively short time I felt significantly better I spent napping in a parking area.
City of Rocks isn’t a very big area, so it doesn’t take too
long to drive all the graded, unpaved roads through the preserve and stop at
the overlooks and rocks with notable California trail settler graffiti. I had
planned to do significantly more hiking since there are nice trails through the
area, but quickly found each time I got out that I was physically miserable.
With such conditions I determined this would not be a good place to spend the
night and camp. I continued onward to Twin Falls north and west on the road
that runs along the west side of the Albion Mountains through more “True West”
scenery.
2025-05-22