Owens Loop is the family-friendly trail at the Red Cliffs Recreation Area. A mile and a half of mostly-flat dirt with short slickrock benches, the loop sits at the south end of Red Cliffs and gets ridden by parents teaching kids to handle a bike, by visitors looking for an easy stretch-the-legs ride, and by riders cooling down after a Church Rocks or Cobble Crusher day. It is the simplest mountain bike loop on the Red Cliffs side of Washington County.
A trail that's mostly walked
Owens is more often hiked than ridden, and the BLM yields-to-hikers signage makes the etiquette clear. On busy spring weekends the loop is a foot traffic trail with bikes as the minority. Most riders treat it as a low-effort cool-down rather than a destination ride, and the route is short enough that a slow lap behind a family of hikers costs only a few minutes.
What the slickrock benches give you
The named feature of the loop is a series of short slickrock benches that run across the higher half of the trail. The slickrock is grippy, the benches are wide, and the sight lines open up enough to see the full Red Cliffs corridor. A new rider trying slickrock for the first time often does so on Owens Loop before progressing to Church Rocks or further up the network.
How it pairs with the rest of the network
Most riders combine Owens Loop with another Red Cliffs trail. The standard half-day at exit 22 runs Owens Loop as a warm-up, Church Rocks as the main ride, and a return through Cottonwood Trail or back to the campground. Owens by itself is too short to be a destination — the value is in the warm-up role and in being the trail that lets a less-confident rider participate in a network day.
Where Owens Loop sits in the 435
Owens Loop is the green-rated entry point to the Red Cliffs side of Washington County's bike network. Together with Barrel Roll on the Santa Clara side and Wire Mesa across the river, it gives the area the gentle-end progression riders need to learn the slickrock terrain that defines the harder trails up the network.