The Monarch of the Wasatch

Yep, that's Lone Peak. It may not be the tallest mountain (around 100 feet shorter than the Twins and the Pfeifferhorn at 11,253') but it's one of the most scenic. Often referred to as the "monarch" of the range, Lone Peak divides the Salt Lake valley to the north from the Utah valley to the south. From the top, both valleys are clearly visible. Seemed like a good mountain to finish up my Wasatch hiking experience on.

I ran into yet another group of 5 BYU students this week. As typical, they were very pleasant and I enjoyed hiking with them. In slightly more surprising news, the sun rose in the east and set in the west that day. A couple of them probably didn't bring quite enough water so I ended sharing some of mine. Stop me if you've heard this before.

The trail starts out with a section that doubles as a mountain bike trail. It's enough to make you despair that the entire hike is going to be an absolute joke. After that, the trail gets really steep for about an hour and a half. To be honest, that part was really really unpleasant. After passing through a brief meadow, we hiked into a glacial cirque near the summit. To get to the summit, we had to climb up the side of the cirque and around the horseshoe-shaped ridgeline and scramble up to the top.

And oh what a scramble it was! Definitely a tough Class III at points with fairly extreme exposure. You basically climb up, over, and down house-sized boulders for a few hundred feet. The summit itself consists of like 3 rocks, so trying to fit 10 people up there at a time was a wee bit challenging. We spent probably close to an hour up there, chatting, eating and taking pictures designed to give our mothers a heart attack.

This weeks Utterly Impractical Hiking Item of the Week award goes to... me! That's right, I was an Epsilon-Minus Semi-Moron and decided that wearing new hiking shoes on an 11-hour hike would be a great idea without breaking them in first. My feet decided otherwise right around the time I started downhill. Granted, there wasn't much I could do about it (my old pair died a sad and painful death on Timp the week before), but it was still an ambitious hike on new shoes. I think I may or may not have jacked up a tendon in my big toe as a result of those shoes (it's hurt all this week especially when I bend it).

Still, I'm glad I did it this week to give them a test run before I head out on my grand adventure on the way home to Michigan. I plan to stop in the Uintas, Yellowstone, the Tetons, possibly Rushmore, and NW Iowa on my way home. I've been ponying up cash for backpacking equipment over the course of the summer. Now all I need of the essentials is a tent and I'm good to go. Programming note: probably won't update this blog until the end of August again, but when I do, it will hopefully be a big update. Shoutout this week to the grandparents (Start and DeVries). :)

By the way, if you'd like the original of any of these photos, just let me know and I'd be happy to provide. Just no using them for commercial purposes. 

Of Moose and Men

Here's the man...

And here's the beast!


Congrats to any of you who caught the reference. Today's climb was Timpanogos, the second tallest mountain in the Wasatch. Although Mt. Nebo is taller, Timp offers much better views.

The same guy must have designed both the trails up Deseret Peak and Timp. Once again, the mountain was replete with completely unnecessary switchbacks, each of which gained maybe 10 feet of elevation. Consequently, the trail was entirely too long (to the tune of 14+ miles round trip) and gentle. Naturally, a really easy trail with terrific views at the top attracts scads of people; Timp is a local legend and is undoubtedly the most popular hike in Utah. My friend Sid and I spent most our day dodging, passing, and avoiding an almost continuous parade of people going up and down the trail.

At 11,700 feet, Timp is the tallest mountain I've climbed. The trail isn't strenuous at any point, including near the top, so I had no problem at all with the elevation, although I did see several people gasping for breath. The mountain is, however, very dramatic. It's one of 57 mountains in the country classified as "Ultra-prominent" (sticking up really vividly 5000 feet above its surroundings), and it certainly lived up to its name. I saw both the Great Salt Lake and Utah Lake (in Provo) to the west and the Heber valley to the east. It was truly incredible.

I managed to completely and utterly destroy my shoes today. They've been in terrible shape for a while now, with chunks of rubber falling off and no grip left on the bottom (making it really tough to climb up or down scree; see last week's post). But today was the final blow. I caught the back of the sole of my right shoe on a rock, and it tore the sole off from the foot-enclosure about 2/3 of the way. So for the rest of the way up and the entire way down, i had the sole of my shoe flapping open and closed like a Venus Fly Trap on amphetamines. Those things are going in the trash can as soon as I can convince myself that it's really a necessity to spend $110 on a new pair of Merrells. 

 And how could I forget? Your Utterly Impractical Hiking Item Of The Week is...? A high school football team. This is bad news for a couple different reasons
1) The Noise, Noise Noise Noise! What do you expect when you get 40 high school boys together?  It's not like Timp is a place for solitude to begin with, but when you yell across the mountain to each other for two hours about the most inane subjects possible, noise pollution is taken to a whole new level
2) Football players stink at hiking. And it's not just the linemen either. They hiked painfully slow, and rested every 5 minutes near the top. When there's 40 people doing that and blocking the trail, the rest of us get antsy.
Apparently 8-year olds can hike Timp just fine; it's the high schoolers who struggle. To be fair, though, the coach gave us a ride in his pickup from the trailhead to where our car was parked.

And now for one of the best pictures I've ever taken:

Scree is not your friend

Since I'm sure everyone checks this blog daily just to see if more Pulitzer material gets posted here, I should explain. Two weeks ago the weather was iffy, so I ended up getting a half hour up the trail and it started pouring. Since this blog is already boring and contrived enough, I thought it would be considerate to spare you a post about pretty much nothing.
Last week (7-21-2012),  I had a grand adventure, but then my browser session crashed when I was 80% finished writing my post, and I lost everything because I'm neglectful and didn't save it. The frustrating part is that I can see the draft of the post I wrote, but can't edit or copy-paste it.
Anyways, enough with the meta-blogging. This post is dedicated to the Broads Fork Twin Peaks (now that's a mouthful). The main story of the Twins is scree. In case you don't know what scree is, it's a bunch of loose rock. The Twins consisted of at least 2 miles of nothing but gravelly rock fragments covering smooth stone. The only thing that's harder than climbing up a scree-covered slope without falling to your death is climbing down a scree-covered slope without falling to your death. I'm going to be honest, the hike was a lot of fun, but that section was really nerve-wracking.
The Twins were the tallest mountains I had hiked thus far, but barely. The Pfiefferhorn is 11,326 feet, West Twin is 11,328 feet, and East Twin is 11,330. The funny thing is that when I was standing on the Pfeifferhorn, I saw a pair of peaks (The Twins) that looked way taller than the Pfeifferhorn. But when I stood on the Twins, the Pfeifferhorn looked taller. So either the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence, or the height of the peaks of the Wasatch are determined by the current gas price.

 Ah yes, the good parts: The views were tremendous. I could literally see every hike that I had done so far with one turn of the head. Even Deseret Peak was vaguely visible in the distance. The 10 miles were quite difficult (one guy I talked to said this was the hardest hike in the Wasatch in his opinion), but they were well worth it. I'm lazy and don't want to type out a really long description, so I'll let the pictures do the talking.

 Below: standing on West Twin looking at the East Twin.

 And this week's Utterly Impractical Hiking Item Of The Week is...? Nothing. I only saw probably 5 or 6 people on the entire hike. But although I didn't see something bizarre, I certainly met someone bizarre.
Meet Greaser. Greaser is a very strange yet eccentrically personable older guy. He picks a mountain and hikes it every day for 5 or 6 months at a time. As I was descending the scree slopes, he was huffing and puffing up with an ancient metal-framed backpack that probably weighed 10 pounds empty and doubled as a lightning rod. After greeting me Tacky-the-Penguin style (complete with a loud nasal "hey there, partner!" and an especially hearty slap on the back), he proceeded to regale me with stories about his close encounters with bears, falls down snowfields, and lightning strikes. I estimate about 10% of it to be actually true, but 100% of it to be highly entertaining. And the kicker? He only refers to himself in the third person.
Greaser: a guy with so much personality, even I couldn't have made him up.

Headed West

O LORD, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth. You have set your glory above the heavens. From the lips of children and infants you have ordained praise because of your enemies, to silence the foe and the avenger. 


When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you care for him? You made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor. You made him ruler over the works of your hands; you put everything under his feet: all flocks and herds, and the beasts of the field, the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea, all that swim the paths of the seas. 


O LORD, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth.

This week's destination was Deseret Peak. Just slightly shorter than the Pfeifferhorn, at 11,031 feet, Deseret Peak features fantastic views. Unlike the other hikes I've done so far, this peak is not in the Wasatch range. Instead, it's part of the Stansbury Range, which is the easternmost mountain chain of the Basin-and-Range physiographic region. What that means, for those of you who don't research geological provinces in your spare time, is that Deseret peak is a lot more isolated than are the peaks in the Wasatch, providing better views.

The views are what made this hike worth it; the hike itself wasn't at all challenging. Whoever made the trail must have been paid by the mile. Almost the entire trail consisted of switchbacks, even when they were completely unnecessary. The trail zig-zagged back and forth across a cirque up until it hit a ridgeline. After that, the trail got less insultingly easy; I saw a few "weekend warriors" in their jeans and brand-name polos really gasping for breath as they climbed the ridgeline toward the summit. But overall, it was easy; even at the high altitude I never maxed out my heart rate.

That brings me to this week's Utterly Impractical Hiking Item Of The Week. This week's winner is a pair of horses. You may say, "they sound like very useful Hiking Items". And you'd be right... for the riders at least. For the rest of us, horses are a huge pain in the butt (pun completely intended). You see, horses, unlike dogs, don't wander off the trail to do their duty. And when you think about how big a horse is, and how narrow the trail is... Suffice it to say that I played a lot of hop-scotch.

Above: view toward the Great Salt Desert with the Bonneville Salt Flats in the distance

Below: looking northeast toward the Great Salt Lake

Next week's update should be significant, assuming the weather cooperates. I have a couple ideas rattling around in the old brain. If anyone would like to recommend a hike to me, I'd love to hear it. Just leave it in the comments or email me.

I'm Speechless

And they say there's no God...

Today's climb was one of the most ridiculously named peaks in the Wasatch: The Pfeifferhorn. I wish there was a fun story about why it's named that, but it's just because some Mr. Pfeiffer, many years ago, liked to climb a mountain that vaguely resembled the Matterhorn. It's also the biggest mountain I've climbed to date; it weighs in at 11,300 feet, give or take a few.


Speaking of giving a few, I finally brought enough water, thanks to my Dad, who mailed me an extra Camelback that he wasn't using. Of course, I managed to screw that up, as I didn't really need 4+ liters of water. Instead, I ended up toting 10 pounds of water all over the mountain for 7 hours. I needed way less than I thought because I got up early (thanks to the old people who live next door and blare their TV with the windows open at 6:30AM) and was on the mountain before 8:00. On the way up, I was shaded for the first half of the hike. The temperatures were very pleasant; I got just a tad chilly at the summit, which we reached around noon.

We? Yes, we. I started by myself and hiked three miles before reaching Red Pine Lake (which is in itself a spectacle). There I ran into a group of BYU students and we climbed from there to the top together. Their company was very pleasant and, just as importantly, they drank part of the reservoir I was lugging around. 

Before Red Pine Lake, the climb was fairly easy. Apparently the older guy who blew past me thought so too; I've never seen anyone on the far side of 60 hike THAT FAST. Grandpa Start, you'd would be proud. Once I got to Red Pine Lake however, it very quickly got difficult. First was a massive boulder field with a steep grade. After leveling out for a bit (although still across boulders), the trail went up a steep slope with subpar footing up to a ridge. The views from the ridge are fantastic. The ridge very quickly turns into an extremely rugged, exposed knife's edge. Afterwards, the final climb up to the summit is at about a 60 degree angle for around 500 vertical feet. By that time, the altitude was really getting to me, so my progress was not exactly rapid. 

This brings me to the Utterly Impractical Hiking Item Of The Week: a peanut butter and jelly sandwich made between two halves a baguette. Sounds delicious, until you consider that the thing had turned into a gooey, runny mess inside this guy's black backpack. As he was eating it, more red and brown slime was falling out of the sandwich onto his lap than was making it into his mouth. I tried to surreptitiously snap a picture of the debacle, but shot without looking at the camera (or him) and completely by accident got this beautiful photo:

The lakes from above:

We made snow angels!

One if by land, two if by air, three if by space

Sorry about the butchered Longfellow reference. The upshot of this weekend was transportation. I didn't do any hiking, (thankfully, because it hit triple digits on Saturday) but did manage to still see a lot.

Part 1: Planes.

The Hill Aerospace Museum features a lot of planes that were based in the neighboring USAF base, among other places. Highlights included quite a few first-generation experimental jet fighters. They've always looked like sharks to me, with the gaping hole just in front of the cockpit. They also had F-15s, F-16s, F/A-18s, and F-22s. But the coolest thing, I thought, was an SR-71 Blackbird. A crash course for those of you who didn't notice the glaring error two sentences ago: the Blackbird was a spy-plane developed by the US during the 60s as a high-altitude, high-speed plane that could laugh at anti-aircraft missile batteries as it raced past at Mach 3. It still holds the record for fastest airplane ever. It flew from New York to London in under 2 hours.

Part 2: Trains.

Sadly, I had less than 45 minutes to see stuff there (thank goodness for free admission!) before I had to take off for Promontory Summit. One of the really annoying historical inaccuracies is the myth that the first transcontinental rail line was completed at Promontory Point. Actually, Promontory Point is the tip of a peninsula that sticks out into the Great Salt Lake-- hardly the place to build a railroad. Promontory summit, located 20 miles to the north, is where the line was completed. The Golden Spike National Historic Site (good grief, what a long name) marks the place. Unfortunately, the railroad no longer runs across Promontory, and hasn't for about 100 years. The line featured torturous grades and sharp curves. Instead, the Southern Pacific Railroad built a causeway all the way across the Great Salt Lake. And that line ran through the aforementioned Promontory Point.
There is still a segment of track left up at Promontory Summit, where they run re-enactments of the joining of the line on May 10, 1969. The replica locomotives were the coolest part; they're fully functioning just like the originals (which were scrapped out in the early 1900s), and are within a quarter inch of all specifications.
The Jupiter was the Central Pacific's locomotive, the 119 was the Union Pacific's.

The rest of it was alright, but not particularly in-depth; I didn't really learn anything of substance. Nonetheless, it was cool and significant and I'm glad I saw it. And while I was in the area...

Part 3: Rockets!

Less than two miles down the road from Promontory was ATK (formerly Thiokol), which is a principal producer of rockets, especially rocket engines. They had a nice little display of their products out front, which included Minutemen missiles and Polaris missiles,both of which were ballistic nuclear missiles. The Polaris missiles were actually made to be launched from submarines. Your homework is to figure out which missile is which (and yes, you can figure it out just from looking at the picture without any outside knowledge). They're the two prominent ones standing upright.

In the back, you can see the Space Shuttle booster. They're re-usable; after every launch the boosters are shipped back to this facility to be refurbished for the next launch. 

Part 4: More trains! 

I headed back to Ogden, UT to visit the Utah State Railroad Museum, located in the old Ogden Union Station. After the completion of the transcontinental line in Promontory, the Union Pacific and the Central (later Southern) Pacific moved their interchange point to the nearest hospitable city, Ogden. The museum was intensely interesting; along with the usual pedantic superficial gloss, there were some pretty good exhibits on the Big Boys, the largest steam locomotives ever made. There was also an interesting model railroad depiction of the line from Sacramento to Ogden. But the coolest part was undoubtedly the collection of equipment. I saw the longest, most powerful diesel locomotive ever made, the DD40AX

World's most powerful diesel not enough for you? How about the world's most powerful locomotive of any type, a gas-electric turbine. This locomotive could haul a 6.5 mile train, fully loaded, by itself. Locomotives of this type were known as "big blows" and banned from operating in southern California because they sounded like jet engines, and were just as loud.

And finally, a pretty steamer. This is the sister of a different locomotive that has been run continuously since the 1940s. It could haul 8-10 passenger cars at 120 miles per hour.

In which I drink the hemlock

Ok so I'm being a little dramatic. But climbing a peak named Mt Olympus today did make me feel like an ancient Greek philosopher, and liquid (in this case, the lack thereof) did just about kill me at points. The real moral you should all take away from this is that I am Socrates, clearly.

Ok fine, I'm only Socrates insofar as I'm quite short, impudent and not especially good-looking. But getting back to the point, I climbed Mt Olympus today. It's noteworthy because it's right on the Wasatch Front, which means it's the most visible mountain to most of the Salt Lake Valley and it dominates the SLC skyline. It's only 9000 feet and change, but it rises steeply from the valley more than 4000 feet below. The trail is apparently only a tad over 3 miles long. But 3 miles is a long way when you're gaining more than 1300 feet each mile. Further complicating matters was the fact that I was under-equipped in terms of water; 2 liters is NOT ENOUGH!

Did you get that? If you're hiking in Utah in June, it's super-arid. And when you're sweating buckets, 2 liters is NOT ENOUGH! If you're still unclear on this point, I suggest you re-read this paragraph. Lather, rinse, repeat as necessary.

Turns out that I did have enough water, not because I brought enough but because I budgeted it well; I drank almost 3/4 of it on the way up, when I was working hard. That's a good rule of thumb to remember for next time. In related news, there are few things better than Minute Made lemonade. I'd buy it in spades. I started drinking it as soon as I paid. I'd totally make it my trade.

So the elevation profile looks like a set of stairs roughly. It starts out with a section of doom, then levels off for a bit. Just when it has you feeling confident, it throws a few switchbacks with poor footing at you: more doom. It levels off just enough where you think you've conquered the worst of it. If I need to tell you that more doom is in order for the next section, you're not a very perceptive reader. It's an unrelenting grade for over a mile (with the poor footing, of course), and it is HOT. It's hard to get Kevin uncomfortably warm, but today did the trick.

Above: not-doom. Below: Yep, that's the trail. Good luck.

But then I hit the saddle point, a gap between two peaks. It's basically completely level there and some people use it as a camping spot. I'd say that at least half of hikers don't actually summit; they go to the saddle point and stop there. That's because the doom I had experienced so far was child's play compared to the journey from the saddle to the top. I'll save you the histrionics: it was hand-over-hand climbing and scrambling. It wasn't super-long (maybe a few tenths of a mile), but it took a while. If you're ever on the mountain and you make it to the saddle, just look for the most forbidding rock face imaginable, and you'll have a rough idea of where the "trail" goes up. It was probably a 70 degree angle upward for most of the climb. And it was FUN. I ditched my pack once the scrambling started (I didn't have enough water anyway, and this would remove the temptation to drink it all at once). It was a good thing I did.

Utahans must be terrible at telling time or something. People kept telling me "15 more minutes" before I would reach the top for a solid hour before there were actually 15 more minutes. Granted, you go faster downhill than up, but I don't care how fast you hike, you can't do in 15 minutes downhill what I do uphill in an hour 15. Well, I suppose you can, but your descent might not be exactly controlled or graceful. But once I was at the top, I found the views to be totally worth the strenuous effort; Olympus looks out over the whole Salt Valley. I had good views of the city, the Great Salt Lake, and the Kennecott copper mine, which, locals can tell you, can be seen from space. Nothing like being proud of a polluting, ugly strip mine. Unfortunately, it was kind of hazy so my pictures turned out rather nondescript, but I suppose that if they were too great you'd never have reason to hike it yourself. Confront the doom!

Above: The view from the top. We see Salt Lake City and the Great Salt Lake is in the background. In the middle of the lake is Antelope Island, upper left. 

This brings me to the Utterly Impractical Hiking Item Of The Week: Before I say it, I should mention that last week's winner was a watermelon that some guys lugged up the trail to Lake Blanche. Delicious? Absolutely. Braindead? Without a doubt. The problem is it weighs 10 pounds, most of the weight is rind, and it provides little hiking nutritional value. Anyways, this week's item is a folding chair! Except it gets worse: it's not that these bozos scrambled up the trail with a folding chair on their backs.Instead, they took the contraption on their backs while rock climbing! They rock-climbed up a sheer rock face with a folding chair on their backs and then hiked down the trail. On a scale of one to ten, that's one of the stupidest items ever to carry on a hike. To be fair, I did the first section (very short) with my landlady (who's absolutely wonderful, as an aside), one of her friends, and the friend's granddaughter. So we had things along like coloring books and crayons. They only went a little ways before deciding the first doom section was too much for them and turning around.

Someone had left a blue bag chair at the top with a note: "You're welcome to sit here, but BRING YOUR OWN NEXT TIME". Yeah... ok. As long as I don't bring a metal folding chair...

Oh and by the way, people look at you strange when you carry a loaf of French bread sticking out of your backpack.