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The Bluff River Trail links environmental micro-communities to their big desert river, the San Juan. Here you'll sample the rich natural history of a river in the heart of the Colorado Plateau. Trail travel is by foot, bicycle, and hoof only. No motorized vehicles, please. The trail system uses public and private lands. Respect for all land keeps these trails open to the public. Access is free. Check locally for all current trail conditions as weather can be a factor.
-From the Bluff City Historic Preservation Association (2003) Bluff River Trail: A Gift to Us All. 

​See images and descriptions of trail segments below. 

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BRT MAP vMarch 2025
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Bluff River Trail Segments

• Sand Island Bench
• Slot Canyon Trail
•  Sand Island Loop
• Floodplain 
• Red Dike Loop

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Sand Island Bench

​Accessed just east of Sand Island Campground turn off on HWY 191. If you descend into the campground on Sand Island Road, you've gone too far. 

The Sand Island Bench section of the Bluff River Trail offers expansive views of the river corridor and the lands of the Navajo Nation beyond. A thick mantle of Pleistocene sands and cobbles overlies the older Jurassic Carmel Formation and Navajo Sandstone. Common perennial shrubs are blackbrush, saltbush, shadscale, and rabbitbrush; seasonal flowering plants include globemallow, wild buckwheat, evening primrose, and sego lily.

Slot Canyon Connector Trail 

WARNING - ADVANCED - FOOT TRAFFIC ONLY 

​Foot Traffic Only! This section of trail is primitive and requires climbing up slick sandstone ledges and advanced balance.

The Slot Canyon offers a close glimpse into now-fossilized sand dunes which once covered most of the Colorado Plateau during the Jurassic Period. The relative softness of Navajo Sandstone made it an ideal canvas on which to etch prehistoric imagery.

Sand Island Loop

The Sand Island Loop trail traces the bottom of a Navajo Sandstone cliff, dense with rock art imagery. If visitors maintain the Bluff hush, they will hear reverberating river songs.

This trail takes one through a cottonwood bosque. There is extraordinary biodiversity at the interface of the bosque and surrounding desert ecosystems. The bosque is an important stopover for migratory birds, such as Great Blue Heron, Sandhill Crane, and the threatened and endangered Southwest Willow Flycatcher and Yellow-billed Cuckoo. Year-round avian residents include canyon wren, red-tailed hawks, American kestrels, owls, woodpeckers, and Canada Goose. 

Flood Plain 

The floodplain is the imprint of the San Juan River's meanders through time.

In 1880 the Latter-Day Saint Apostle Erastus Snow wrote that the bottoms along the river at Bluff varied in width from one-half to one mile. He also noted, "…extensive cottonwood groves in places, and generally covered with sunflowers, greasewood, rabbit brush, sagebrush and other luxuriant growth. Deep alluvial soil."​

Red Dike Loop

Red Dike is a 0.8-mile-long levee constructed with rock cribs and steel cable "jetty jacks," overlain with compacted sediments and limestone rip-rap. It was built during 1949-1950 by local residents, with support from the Soil Conservation Service and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, to control San Juan River flooding. 

Wetlands along the North Loop and the cottonwood bosque along the South Loop shelter deer, coyotes, raccoons, and provide nesting habitat for endangered, migratory, and resident birds. Watch the trail for their footprints. Overhead, in the sky, watch for red-tailed hawks, bald eagles, ravens, geese, ducks, and Great Blue Herons.

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