Ryan Mountain

Ryan Mountain's lot is on your right in about three hundred yards, with toilets, and on busy days you'll want to arrive early. It's rated strenuous, three miles round trip, one thousand fifty feet of gain, an hour and a half to two and a half, and not to be tried in the heat. The mountain itself reads backwards. Below is pale monzogranite, and the dark cap is much older gneiss, pronounced nice, well over a billion years old. The old rock sits on the young because the molten rock pushed up underneath it. Geology Tour Road, about three miles east of this lot, is sand, eighteen miles round trip, about two hours, and the park says you'll want high clearance and four-wheel drive, so check at a visitor center before you drive it. A two thousand two park assessment put narrow lanes and soft shoulders behind most of the park's serious crashes. A wheel drops into soft sand, the driver overcorrects, and the car often rolls. Superintendent James Cole could only improve roads that already existed, because every other square mile was private land, and an old track counted as public by long use. But the old trails ducked into the washes, so he looked and looked, driving a truck, until he found a way around them. The reason the monument roads wind around so much, he wrote, is that old system of trails.