Yesterday I hiked Adam's Canyon in Layton. The trailhead is very accessible. It's at the top of Oak Hills Drive, which is the same thing as Gentile Rd in Layton. You go up Highway 89 just a little north of Oak Hills Drive, and you can turn off the road and come back on East Side Drive to the parking lot right next to the little reservoir. The trailhead rises from there along some switchbacks that are supported by retaining walls and railings. Whoever took all the time to install the railings and retaining walls, thank you very much. These switchbacks are not necessarily the steepest or the most challenging part of the hike, but I actually found them the most tiring part of the day, both on the way up and on the way down.

After pushing through the switchbacks and crossing some open spaces, I finally entered the canyon, and this is where the hike really becomes enjoyable. Almost the entire hike is along side the creek that comes down out of the canyon, which means the sound is wonderful through the whole hike. I came across several other groups while I was hiking, and most of the groups included children as young as 8 or 9 years old, so this is not an overly difficult trail.

There are a couple of places where the trail crosses the creek, and the water was high, as can be seen from the picture of this bridge. The water was flowing right over the top of the bridge in several places. In another spot where crossing the creek meant choosing rocks, there were not very many rocks to choose from because of the water level.

The creek cascades down the mountain in some gorgeaous ways. There are several small waterfalls that make the hike completely beautiful. This waterfall comes over a rock. In the picture you can't see it, but there is actually quite a good sized space behind the waterfall, up under that rock.

There hasn't been any snow around my house for quite some time, but I didn't have to hike very long before I started running into snow. In several places the trail went right along the top of the snow, which made for some fun, slippery times and a few instances where my foot would sink several feet. For this view, I climbed up on top of the rock wall that ran along the side of the trail. Great view from up there, and as a bonus, I got a clear cellular signal. You can see the line of snow in the lower right side of the picture. I'm looking down on the trail, which goes right along the top of the snow there.

At the top of the trail, hikers are rewarded with this final waterfall, which drops into a pool. It is by far the prettiest spot on the entire hike.

The trail ends at this waterfall, but I didn't feel like stopping, so I climbed a crevice that rises north of this waterfall and crossed over the ridge to a summit above the waterfall. The view was fantastic above there. I took several pictures from up there that I need to stitch together into a panorama.

There was another peak I wanted to climb, but I knew I didn't have enough daylight, so I started down. To start my descent, I selected a track of one of DJ Rufus White's house mixes called "The Children Need to Get to School". I wasn't rushing, but I still came down pretty quickly, even doing about ten minutes of trail running when the trails permitted. The music track is 61 minutes long, and it ended just as I was coming down the last switchback, so it took me almost exactly an hour to descend, but a lot of that was climbing down the rock above the waterfall.