Yellow Spire short loop + back bowl

This hike of about 4 miles and 400 ft of gain starts at Silica Dome parking lot and heads north in the area seen in the first photo.

 After crossing about 1000 ft of scrub you get to a view of the area you are heading to. It is straight ahead in this photo. It is an area of orange colored badlands just to the left of the redrock outcrop you can see in the photo (upper right third)

 Walking down the hill you pass several colorful rock outcrops.

 Soon you come to a small wash with nice colors.

 After walking through the wash a while you come to an 6 foot dry falls and just below it you climb out of the wash on the right to get on an old road cut.

 Down the old road, and on the right is another nice small wash pictured here. We dropped down into this wash and continued north keeping sight of the red rock area you see in this photo. Your next goal is the entrance to Yellow Spire wash just to the left of the redrock area.

 Walking down the wash there is a left turn into a larger wash you have to take to get to the left of the redrock. If you miss it you will soon come to a place where you enter the right edge of that redrock area at a dry fall and slot.

 This is the view at the entrance of Yellow Spire wash.

 The Yellow Spire. The trail continues straight up the wash, over a small rise to the HooDoo area.

 Past the Hoodoo area you remain in the wash a short distance before climbing out to enter what I call the "convoluted" area. Here you climb over two ridges and through a Squeeze and the path is not at all obvious without a guide.

 The Squeeze.

 Climbing over the next ridge.

 View from the top of that ridge looking at Virgin peak. After this high point you go down the other side and follow a wash down to the original wash that you climbed out of just past the large Hoodoo area.

 In a small side canyon there are a lot of the small sand Hoodoos common in this area of valley of fire.

 This is back near the large Hoodoo area looking back to where we had been.

Adding another mile on another day we went directly to the rear part of Yellow Spire to see if we could finish the loop that Brian does.

 In one small wash we found this new arch. John Ward provided this photo. It wasn't big enough for all of us to go through, but we could all step over it.

 This is a general view of the kind of rocks found in the back bowl. there is more pink and white than other places in Valley of Fire.

 We stopped for our snack at this view.

 There was a good selection of small sand hoodoos here.