A Visit to Rock Corral Recreation Area, Milford, Utah

The kids and I wanted to go to Cedar City, so we left the afternoon before so we could go camp someplace interesting. I wasn't exactly sure where we were going to camp, but as we approached Milford with the beautiful sunlight on the granite rock of the Mineral Mountain Range, I decided that would be the place.

I had been wanting to check out The Rock Corral Recreation Area for many years, but had always just gone by this sign along Utah Highway 21 on the south side of Milford.

It was a Friday night, so we were expecting to see lots of people up there. But it turned out we didn't see anyone else! We found a nice place to camp that even included a bathroom.


The moon was rising early, so I tried to get a photo of an awesome tree in the camping area with some of the stars showing.

The next morning I woke up early and wandered around. Even though I was in flip flops, I couldn't resist scampering to the top of a ridge for this view.

We left our camping area and headed to the day-use area.

We found more amazing rocks--and no one else!

The end of the road has a nice picnic shelter. 

We took a social trail from there and went by some maple trees.


And some oaks! We don't have oaks by us, so I'm always excited to see them.


We wandered for a bit, admiring the rugged scenery.


Then we headed out and actually saw one other person! We also took a short walk out a ridge, and down in the ravine next to a spring saw a deer.


We also stumbled across a Utah Life Elevated Geocache.


There are lots of opportunities for rock climbing and rock hounding in the Mineral Mountains. We didn't come prepared, so we headed on to Cedar City, taking the scenic way across the mountains. Some cows joined us on the road.


We didn't know where we would end up, but eventually we got to a tiny town with some interesting ruins.

Our morning explorations got us to Cedar City about lunch time, where we ate at the Hong Kong Buffet, which has really good sushi. Yum, yum.

Our next stop was to the Mastermind Room Escape. Desert Boy had gone for his birthday with my husband and Desert Girl, and with some hints, they had made it out of the Ski Lodge in 65 minutes. I had made a snafu ordering the tickets, so had the ones that I had gotten on Groupon that were only valid during the open hours (meaning you might be paired with another group). The snafu meant that I had the opportunity to go too, so we signed up for the Detective's Room.


While waiting, we worked on some other puzzles.

Well, I'd like to say we were awesome detectives and got out in 39 minutes, but we didn't. We didn't get out at all. But it was fun (for the first half hour) and then a little frustrating (when we couldn't figure out clues).  Overall it was a good experience, and we learned some things about ourselves (like we need to be a lot more thorough searching).

On the way home, I snapped a photo of this wildfire that had burned right across the highway near Minersville. The retardant drops were really obvious.

It was a fun short trip, and I always enjoy checking out new things!