Hike from Pine Valley near St George, Utah to Signal Peak

Signal Peak is 10,369 feet high and a dominant mountain you can see from St George Utah. There are several trails leading to the top. Two of the trails starts from Pine Valley, a 45 minute drive from St. George. The Forsyth trail starts from outside the Dixi National Forest Recreation area. The Browns Point Trail starts from inside the recreation area and a day pass has to be bought ($ 5). The Forsyth trail starts at approximately 6650 feet. The Brown Point Trail starts at approximately 6800 feet.

Both trails take you close to Signal Peak. The problem is that non of the trails tells you where to go to reach the top of Signal Peak! So you need either a topographic map or a GPS with a Topo map.
My first attempt to reach was via Browns Point Trail. The trail disappeared at around 9500 feet. Then I hiked off trail up to 9800 feet. That was strenuous, it is a lot of fallen trees around and not easy to find a path. Since I started 2 pm it was getting late so I decide to return back down.

Some days later I tried the Forsyth Trail. Even if it starts lower than Browns Point trail, I found it quicker to reach altitude and the trail is easier to follow all the way up to where it flattens out. Then you are 1/4 mile away from Burger Peak (10,321 feet). But to reach Burger Peak you have to hike off the trail, so again a GPS is handy. After reaching Burger Peak, I headed in the direction to Signal Peak which I could see from Burger Peak. But that led me to a too step grade down to hike. so I had to head more right and eventually reached the bottom of the valley I thought was to the right of Signal Peak. I found a trail and headed left and followed it for maybe a mile or two, but it kept going downwards, so eventually I figured out that I had gone the wrong way. So I turned around and followed the trail and hoped I would come to the trail that led to Signal Peak. But no trail took off from this trail, and I ended up where I had come up.

My problem now was that I did not have a map and my GPS died. So I gave up going in the direction where I thought Signal Peak was. It is easy to get disoriented when you walk in a dense forest.

Back home I connected my GPS to Garmins Basecamp. And I could then see that I had been 1/2 mile from Signal Peak. The picture below is from Burger Peak and you can see Signal Peak ahead.

The next picture is how the trail looks like, you can see it all the time but it is not marked in any way.

This is past Signal Peak and close to where you come up if you take Browns Point Trail. The meadows are at about 9800 feet. So here you are more than 500 feet under Signal Peak.

This picture is taken at about 9900 feet and shows the ridge of Signal Peak. Far down you can see a big lake which is in state park Sandy Hollow.

Here I am on my way back down towards Pine Valley.

The hike up to Burger Peak took me 3 hours. I like to hike continuously, so with rest stops you might use 4 to 4,5 hours. Down goes quicker, but take it easy on steep parts, its a lot of stones and pebbles that can cause you to flip backwards if you walk too fast.

My hike was 15-16 miles back and forth. I would estimate that a direct hike the shortest distance from Forsyth Trail is about 13 miles back and forth. For well trained hikers it might tak just over 3 hours up and 2.5 hours down. For average hikers 4-5 hours up and 3-4 hours down.

The map below shows my attempts hikes to Signal Peak. The plot at the bottom of the picture is Browns Point Trail, where I ended up at about 9800 feet. From there it was about two miles to Signal Peak.
The upper plot shows my second try that ended where the blue flag is. As you can see that was very close to Burger Peak. The third trial is where my GPS "died", or more correctly, it warned me that is was low on battery, so I turned it off. Then I turned it on again at some few points I wanted to register. So the Straight lines show where I was. So it is easy to see next time where I should leave the trail to head for the top of Signal Peak.