The Goosenecks road ends at a lot with two short, easy walks. One reaches an overlook above the looping canyon of Sulphur Creek, and the other runs to Sunset Point for wide views at either end of the day. Footing near the rim takes care, so walkers keep well back from the edge.
End of the gravel. Take the lot, and if the sound drops when you switch off, tap play. Two short walks start here. The Goosenecks is a tenth of a mile, Sunset Point four tenths, both easy, both under fifty feet of climbing. The danger is the footing. Loose grit on bare stone is very slippery, so stay well back from the edge, above all with a camera up. What's down there breaks a rule. Rivers usually follow the lay of the land. Sulphur Creek picked up its loops on flat ground, somewhere between sixty-six and thirty-eight million years ago, and when the plateau began rising, about twenty million years ago, the creek kept every bend and sawed straight down. You're about to look at the curves of a lazy meadow stream, cut in rock. Lazy is the wrong word, though. It runs about two inches deep until it doesn't. In August of two thousand three a storm took it to sixteen feet deep and a hundred forty wide, and hundreds of boulders washed onto the highway. The floods of nineteen ninety-seven left a seventy-foot swim in the middle of this creek's popular gorge trail. Walk out now and find the creek at the bottom. Follow it with your finger around the first bend, and then the next.
Photo: Famartin / Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 3.0 (cropped)