This is not snow along this canyon wall in Utah, but remnants of hail that had fallen in thunderstorms minutes earlier. The sun is already out. But it was frightening, too, as the two days of storms on a five-day trek were the first real thunderstorms I had endured on a hike. One afternoon, Thor bounced his arrows all around the red rocks of southern Utah, showering hail off the rust walls and turning the typically clear waters of the Escalante River and Coyote Gulch into a muddy tea of tamarisk leaves and blood-colored rock residue. Hiking out in more thunderstorms, I climbed the final ledge to the trailhead and looked out to see a nearby plateau white-topped.
Snow squalls can develop rapidly in high elevations of the Rocky Mountains.
Then, a little farther up, I looked out to see those mountains had suddenly disappeared. Before I knew it, snowflakes swirled around me, cutting my visibility to 100 feet. Just as quickly as it started, the snow squall passed and the mountains re-emerged. This happened three or four more times before I returned to the trailhead. I was visiting my friend Dennis Heter, a hiker who had completed the Appalachian Trail and was the overseer of this marvelous little wilderness of waterfalls and bluffs in northwest Arkansas.