The trailhead starts in fairly average-looking Lower Colorado River Sonoran Desert terrain. Nice enough, but nothing spectacular.

A local geological gem found just a few miles south of Lake Havasu City, Arizona is a narrow defile in the desert technically named “Crack In the Wall Canyon”. This is a short but beautiful slot canyon accessed via a moderately difficult trail totaling about 5 miles round trip. The trail is on Federal BLM lands leased by Mohave County for the purposes of various types of recreation. Formally called SARA Park, the acronym stands for Special Activities and Recreation Area. Part of the park is developed into athletic fields, a racing track, rodeo grounds, and a shooting range, but most of it is hiking and biking trails, including the canyon. As such, it has acquired the informal and slightly mischievous name of SARA’s Crack, which is what it is much better known as despite it not being the “real” name.

Colorful lichens coat the surfaces of certain north-facing rock types. A wide variety of different types of geological strata can be seen along the hike in only a few miles.

Things are starting to get interesting….

The first indications of the slot canyon appear about 1.25 miles down the trail, which slopes downhill towards the shores of Lake Havasu on the Colorado River. Balanced Rock Cove on the lake is the final destination of the trail, about 2.5 miles from the parking lots near SARA Park. The round trip total for the entire hike is about 5 miles, although it is easy to make that longer by venturing up side canyons or walking laterally along the eastern shoreline of the lake if you wish.

The slot canyon portion of the SARA’s Crack hike is through some sort of pinkish metamorphic rock, although I do not know the type.

Overall the grade of difficulty to hike the trail is moderate for most people. It’s not impossible for people with kids or pets to navigate, but is challenging enough to be fun. Of course you do not even need to go all the way to Balanced Rock Cove, in which case the total length of just the slot canyon portion is about half the length at between 2.5 and 3 miles total. But I think the cove is worth the effort so if you have the time and can hike the 5 or so miles, I recommend doing both.

M.L. starts clambering over dry waterfalls caused by boulders wedged in the increasingly narrow wash channel.

One of the more challenging sections of the slot approaches, indicated by a rope affixed to some climbing gear wedged into a rock cleft.

The reason these are called slot canyons is because they are extremely narrow when compared to their depth. Many are narrow enough to touch both walls with your outstretched arms, and a general definition is that the canyon be at least 10 times deeper than it is wide. Most slot canyons in the USA are in sandstone or limestone strata and the overwhelming majority of them are concentrated in the Colorado Plateau of southern Utah, northern Arizona, western Colorado, and northwestern New Mexico. It’s a treat to be in a different type of rock in a different geological zone, that being the Sonoran Desert.

The rope dangles down a dry waterfall about 8 feet high.

The rock here is very fine-grained and is polished quite smooth by the action of eons of flash floods, making it easy to slide down on your behind. The rope is there mostly to assist you in getting back up the canyon later, since this 8 foot high slide would be too slippery for many people to scale without aid.

Additional folds in the canyon walls await those who descend the rock slide waterfall. The varying shades of pink, rose, and soft yellow are very attractive.

More canyoneering obstacles lie below the first rock slide.

M.L. elegantly descends SARA’s Crack, a slot canyon south of Lake Havasu City, Arizona. Well at least he looks elegant in these photos. In reality, neither one of us was quite so adept as we appear at navigating a few of the tougher sections of this canyon. I took a rather inelegant fall while trying to ascend the boulder with the short section of ladder in the first photo on the way back out of the canyon. No harm done, fortunately, but it is a reminder that humor aside, I am not as nimble as I used to be 20 years ago, and caution is always merited….

It’s nice that someone placed things to help make the hike easier.

Someone placed an aluminum plank over this water-filled pothole to help hikers avoid getting their feet wet. None of these hiking aids (rope, ladder, and boardwalk) were here the last time I hiked SARA’s Crack in 2011. I admit it’s a welcome upgrade to make things simpler. Water is not always present in the canyon, but we came across 4 or 5 spots where water had accumulated from rain that fell the week beforehand.

There are places along the walls where folding is evident in the crystalline grain of the metamorphic rock that comprises the canyon bottom.

Once beyond the slot canyon, the terrain opens up again.

The slot canyon ends rather abruptly at some point and broadens into a wide dry wash channel, one typical of most deserts. The geology also changes quickly and becomes a type of sandstone. Note the hiking trail on the canyon rim, on the darker hills in the distance, which some people use to get back to the parking lot rather than trying to go back up the canyon bottom with all of its uphill barriers.

There aren’t just slots along the SARA’s Crack hike.

There are several holes in the rock formations along the hike, both above the canyon as well as within it. Most such openings are called “windows” if they are less than about 8 feet in diameter (which this one is), and they become “arches” if much larger than that. It’s not a hard and fast definition of course, but a loose rule used to gauge the relative size and prominence of such features.

A second set of narrows appears as the trail follows the normally dry wash channel down towards the lake.

For many people, hiking through the slot canyon is enough and they turn around and either take the alternate rim trail back to the trailhead and parking lot, or they reverse direction and go back up the various features they just climbed down. Those who persist in going to the cove on the lake will discover a second section of narrow canyon.

Conglomerates form the walls of the lower segment of canyon along the SARA’s Crack trail.

The second set of narrows is in an entirely different type of stone, a combination of water-deposited sediments fused together in a sandy matrix called conglomerate. Some layers are consistently comprised of small sand particle sizes, indicating that calmer waters deposited them. Others are “poorly sorted” with a range of pieces both large and small jumbled together randomly, which indicates deposition during the turbulence and chaos of a larger flooding event. The image above shows both types of strata for easy comparison.

While this section of the canyon channel is constricted and has vertical walls, it’s probably not really accurate to call it a “slot” because it’s not very deep relative to its width. It would be more correct to call them “narrows”, although just like the difference between a “window” and an “arch”, it is also not readily quantified along strict lines either.

Brittlebush blooms along the wash channel in late February 2020.

One of the lower Sonoran Desert’s most showy and abundant flowering plants is brittlebush (Encelia farinosa). Golden sunflower-like heads rise well above a mound of silvery foliage, blooming most abundantly in February through April, although some flowering can occur on a few shrubs any cooler month between September and May if there’s been rain. Brittlebushes have golden ray flowers (the “petals”) and usually a similarly yellow disc flower (the “center”), but in some individuals the disc flowers are a dark red or brown. The ones with the red centers, like these, are particularly attractive and would merit selection for growth in a desert landscape garden.

Dodder (Cuscuta sp) covers the leafless, spinescent stems of a desert smoketree (Psorothamnus spinosus) in a dry desert wash along the trail.

Dodder is a parasitic plant that grows a tangle of orange stems that covers whatever host happens to be underneath. The desert southwest has a number of species, which can be very difficult for even experts to identify. Some dodders are generalists that attach to a wide variety of different species while others are very host specific. This one is growing on a desert smoketree (Psorothamnus spinosus) and I suspect that it’s one of the types that sticks to one host. Dodders are most prevalent in spring, when their vibrant orange spaghetti piles frequently draw attention from even casual observers.

The smoketree has a pretty heavy dodder infestation, but will probably survive for years even when burdened like this. But there is no doubt that this is still stressful to the smoketree and sometimes heavily afflicted branches do die and drop off.

Dodders twist around the stems of their hosts, sending rootlike structures called haustoria into the cells of the host to withdraw water and nutrients for their own survival. Most dodders in the desert go dormant in the hot summer season, so that they won’t overtax their host plant and kill it. After all, a dead host will also mean a dead parasite. This is quite contrary to the old axiom that “A successful parasite kills its host”. That doesn’t make sense, because a successful parasite evades its host’s defenses quietly and keeps it alive so that it too will have life. A successful predator kills its “host”, aka prey; a parasite does not.

Backwater marshlands and mesquite bosques signify the place where the wash channel that carved SARA’s crack empties into the lake.

At some point the trail reaches the waters of Lake Havasu, impounded since 1938 behind Parker Dam on the Colorado River. The first sign of the reservoir is the sudden appearance of groves of mesquite trees (Prosopis velutina), salt cedars (Tamarix ramosissima), and arrowweed (Pluchea sericea), all of which were absent farther up the dry wash channel but which suddenly appear once subsurface water becomes adequate to support their growth. These riparian plants also ring the shoreline of the main lake in places where there is enough soil to support them. The calm waters of the lake itself become visible after cresting a small rise that avoids the impenetrable thickets of vegetation.

Arriving at the edge of Lake Havasu. The shoreline of California is across the water a couple of miles away.

This particular rock feature above, standing sentinel at the lake, probably has an informal name, although if it does I don’t know it. To my eye it sort of resembles a medieval castle, or perhaps one of those inflatable playhouses that kids can jump around in at fairs and amusement parks.

Colorful banded sedimentary rocks, golden brittlebush, and blue-green water share a rocky shore at Balanced Rock Cove on Lake Havasu.

Balanced Rock sits atop its eroding pedestal, reaching about 25 feet high. The narrowest part of the base is at least 4 to 5 feet thick, so it’s not all that precariously positioned to fall, which means it ought to in theory stand for many thousands more years as long as humans don’t interfere with it.

The varying bands of sedimentary and metamorphic rocks found at the cove set off nicely against the green waters.

The sedimentary layers found at Balanced Rock Cover are mostly conglomerates, as described earlier. I believe that most of these sedimentary rocks were laid down by eons of Colorado River flooding, including erosion from tributary side channels such as the one that carved SARA’s Crack. While they may well be a couple million years old or more, they are also probably much younger than the underlying metamorphic rocks they sit atop. These ancient metamorphic hills and cliffs were thrust upwards over hundreds of millions of years of plate tectonics and mountain orogeny in this region, and they are probably vastly older than the recently-laid mixed erosional deposits that obscure their bases. It’s an interesting combo leading to the several types of geology in only a short distance that I’ve been highlighting.

The fluted columns on the eroded conglomerate sediments show angled cross-bedding, making for an interesting pattern in these unique formations.

Numerous species of migratory birds and waterfowl rely upon the Colorado River corridor to survive, many of which might not otherwise be expected in the desert nearby.

Western grebes (Aechmophorus occidentalis) are water birds found in the western USA and parts of adjacent Canada and Mexico. The one above was calling loudly at the time I took this photo, perhaps since spring is breeding season here? Look at the red eye, very beautiful. Western grebe populations are in decline, unfortunately, although the species is not yet considered endangered, merely vulnerable to further losses. Most of Lake Havasu is protected by a complex of Havasu National Wildlife Refuge, several state parks, and BLM lands, providing both recreational opportunities for people and crucial habitat for wildlife.

Two medium-sized Canary Island date palms have found their way to Balanced Rock Cove.

A pair of non-native Canary Island date palms (Phoenix canariensis) have become established in the mesquite bosque at the head of the wash that drains SARA’s crack slot canyon above. They are no doubt progeny of trees planted as landscape specimens in nearby Lake Havasu City only a few miles away. Normally I don’t care for non-native species in natural landscapes but I’d make an exception for these two palms and I hope they continue to live undisturbed.