The Houston Pocket - An ATV Ride

The Houston Pocket (a.k.a. The Pocket) is a great place to take a quad ride. There are some awesome views of the surrounding mountains and towns. There are even Indian ruins if you look hard enough.

We have actually taken this ride several times and each time we come away with different pictures of the area and different experiences. We have seen several whitetail deer on this ride and I would imagine that mountain lion are around somewhere.

To get to the starting point of this ride you will need to follow Highway 260 east out of Payson and Star Valley. Hang a right when you get to the FS 371 road. (At the time that I wrote this, the 371 road was just before a new "elk crossing" area.)

Follow the 371 road and stay to the right. You will pass a brush dumping pit and will soon come across a bare area on your left with a stock tank. This is where we offload our quads to start our trip.

Continue following the 371 road. You will have fantastic views of the surrounding mountains and what is called "Hole in the Ground Canyon". Brushy Basin Canyon will also be in your views.

There are some really beautiful rock formations on this ride. You will cross several creeks on the way to The Pocket as well.

When you come to the junction of the 371 and the 454, take a left and continue on the 454. This area is gorgeous but the road is a little hairy. Most of this area is a steep grade down and your quad will tend to slide some.

Follow the 454 road all the way to an abandoned ranch house. (To the best of my knowledge, this area is now owned by the Forest Service). Actually there are two houses, one made of rock and the other made of wood. I believe that at a later time the rock house was used as storage for livestock food.

This place is really cool! If no one is using it, you can actually walk through the ranch house and see the 2 rooms within. People come down to The Pocket to hunt deer or quail and if they stay the night they use the abandoned cabin.

Most people treat the cabin with respect and keep it cleaned up and useable, but as usual, there are some people who just have to leave the place trashed.

Some of the hills around the cabin have some really cool Indian ruins but I will leave that for you to find. If you think you're in a good area, just look down and you will see pottery shards all over the place. Remember to leave the shards so other people can share the same experience.

Most of the walls of the ruins have fallen but you can see the shapes of each dwelling area. Be very careful walking through the ruins, the rocks are pretty unstable.

This picture of the pottery shards just goes to show how much is in the area. This is just one spot where I looked down. I did not touch any of this pottery. There are at least six pieces in just this one small area. Most of the items we found were quite thick and probably used as bake ware but some of it was thin and painted with the red and black.

As we were walking around the tops of the hills in the area, we looked off in the distance at another mountain and saw this really cool rock wall that was built along the span of the other mountain. I zoomed in as close as I could.

To get out of The Pocket you must back track to the starting point.

The last time we went to The Pocket it was pretty cold and most of the creeks had ice above the flowing water and there were frozen"waterfalls" just off the roads. I took these pictures just for the heck of it.