a few hikes

I've said repeatedly that I was going to talk about a few of the good hikes that I've done this summer. I'll just talk about the things I've done on my Saturdays. Beware, this post is kind of longish and is mostly just hiking narrative. I've tried to spruce it up a little with the customary wit and self-deprecation that usually accompanies most of my blogging, so hopefully that will help you get through.

Three weeks ago, I decided to go on a hike. Since I had basically no friends at that point or what friends I had I didn't feel like asking to come with me on a crazy hike, I went alone. I decided to go up Little Rock Canyon and try to get to the top of Squaw Mountain from there. Looking at Squaw Mountain from the west, you should be able to see two canyons. One, directly south of Squaw and separating it from Y Mountain is Rock Canyon. Look more to the north, and you'll see that the ridge leading up to the top of Squaw is cut into by a smaller, narrower canyon. That's Little Rock Canyon.

Please examine my carefully marked-out map of the terrain:

Rock Canyon and Little Rock Canyon are clearly delineated. Also the path I took getting to the top of Squaw Mountain is also pretty visible, I'd say. So. I drove around Provo until I got to a neighborhood that had a little trail going off into that canyon you see on your left. And I just started going up. The trail was kinda steep in places and gained pretty fast, but the worst part was that the trail just kinda died real quick. It took me up to what looked like a paranoid Mormon's Second Coming hideout, because there was a shelter up there with a whole bunch of tools and these big, padlocked boxes with food storage in them. It was possibly a hobo hang-out, but to tell you the truth I kinda suspect it might be used by both the former and the latter. I actually felt like I was intruding, and half-expected some crazy hobo to start defending his home and whack me with one of those crowbars that were lying around. So I kept going.

Problem is, that right around the hobo-land is where the trail went cold and the only real option was hiking up what for my brother last year was "a dry riverbed." Oh yeah by the way my brother Jeff and his sis-in-law Kate did this hike last year, which is what inspired me to do it this year. The main difference between this year and last year is that this year we've had the wettest spring on record for Provo. That means that more rain/snow has fallen this spring than any other one since people started paying attention, i.e. since like the 1880's. So what was a dry-ish riverbed last year for Jeff was more like a raging river for me this year.

Hopping around from stone to stone in the river wasn't really an option, from the steep uphill grade that I and the river were going. But the thick underbrush made trying go along the side of the stream almost completely impractical. This led me to do even more impractical things, like scramble around on the hillside above the stream. Bad idea for the following reasons:

• Really steep
• Completely covered in scratchy undergrowth
• Shale rock made my footing really unsure

Even so, I continued up in this haphazard manner for way longer than I ever should have. I had the idea that if I just made it up to the canyon wall, I should be able to shimmy along against the wall of the canyon until I got around to where I could get on top of the ridge. I was most def. wrong on that account. Getting up there involved some minor bouldering, scrambling, and pulling myself up by little tree roots. By the time I actually got up to the canyon wall, I realized that the underbrush was really really thick up there and going along that way would just be way harder than it was worth. This little side-journey is what you were wondering that little area leading off to the right is.

Anyway I decided to give up on this little adventure at this point. I started letting myself down backwards using the tree roots to kind of rappel down (I know that it had nothing to do with real rappelling, but still). But as I got closer to the river I just couldn't give up trying one more time, so I crashed through the bushes and made it to the river further up the canyon than where I'd been before. Lo and behold, there was the continuation of the trail on the south side of the river that my brother had mentioned! I called him to touch base and let him know I'd found it, then I kept going.

I came to a fork in the river, and I took the branch leading southeast. This took me back into a really deep forest behind the ridge, and to be honest, it was pretty creepy back there. I started thinking about bears and cougars, and it didn't help that I had just watched Jurassic Park a couple nights before. It was kind of stifling back there-- the snow had recently melted, leaving the ground flat and stale looking. Everything had this weird film over it from being crushed under the snow pack for so long. The "trail" I was following was also pretty much just a game trail. I found three things that kinda spooked me:

1. Bear scat (super old, but still)
2. A bear track in a melting snowbank (I took a picture of it on my cellphone, and my brother verified that it was a bear track)
3. Bones scattered here and there and one really big pile of bones forming most of a skeleton

Of course, my reason was telling me that these bones had probably been there for years... but still. Turns out that Jeff and Kate encountered the very same pile of bones last year, my cellphone picture matches this facebook picture of Kate's almost perfectly:

Except there were more bones there. I promise.

Anyway after standing around for a little while and getting frustrated with the "trail" that I was following, I decided to call Jeff my mentor to ask what he did at this point. He told me that around that pile of bones, just a little after he and Kate decided just to bush-whack right up to the top of the ridge. I looked up from my phone call and saw what looked like a fairly passable game trail through the undergrowth and decided that it was was now or never. I set off up to the top of the ridge to get out of that creepy forest.

Easier said than done, though. My game trail ended soon, and then next one I found took me further north than I should have gone and still made me crash through underbrush, but eventually I got up to where I was above the tall trees and could see down into the valley below. What I saw made my heart quail. I really hadn't gotten very far, and I could actually see my car faintly down below. I really had gone too far north in my way up and I had tooons of awful bush-whacking to go. And I mean awful. These short, springy little scrub oaks that densely cloak the side of the mountain are seriously the devil. I had to manhandle my way through them and got equally manhandled and scratched up as I forced my way up and up.

Two embarrassing side-stories must be noted here. The first was while I was bush-whacking up a steep section and heard a sound that sounded like footfalls on the mountain above me. Now, it really couldn't have been anything big enough to eat me, because I don't think a bear or a cougar would be stupid enough to crash through that section of the mountain like I was doing. But still, I froze for awhile and waited for a few minutes to try to see what it was that was coming towards me. I kept hearing the footsteps but didn't see anything. In my mind I was picturing what a confrontation would look like-- a big mountain lion foolishly leaping at me from up above, me trying to tackle it to the ground, and both of us just rolling through the touch scratchy bushes all the way down till we rolled off the edge of the canyon. Finally I lost my nerve and just started going again, when I found out what my aggressor was-- a rabbit. Oh gosh so terrifying. Anyway I was a little on edge from that when further up the mountain after I'd gotten out of the really dense bushes this dumb wood-grouse basically exploded out from under my feet in a thunderous flapping of dumb wings. I think the grouse was freaked out, but let's be honest I think it scared me way more than I scared it. That flapping is so LOUD. Anyway it flew away and I kept going, feeling like an idiot.

Around that stupid bird incident is where I started to be able to just walk again, which was a huge relief. Bush-whacking is really hard work, for reals. I mean to be honest, I think at this point I'd covered only about a mile. Granted, most of my time had been spent scrambling around like a billy goat in the canyon trying to find an alternate route than the riverbed, but still it was really slow going at the top of the ridge too. But like I said once it was clear I was finally able to just walk and start moving. It was getting a little late by this time, too. I'd started the hike around around 4:30 in the afternoon and spent maybe an hour and a half messing around and being lost. So after the strenuous bush whacking, it was like seven o'clock by the time I really got walking along the ridge. It was the coolest part of the hike, hands down. Even though most of the terrain had that flat, stale look to it from being so recently under the snow pack, I ended up hiking over some really cool terrain. Once again I'm going to steal a picture from Jeff and Kate's hike because I just had my dumb cell phone and didn't have my camera to take cool pictures with:

Just imagine that Jeff is me.

So there were some interesting rock formations up there. Actually, some of it looked a lot like the rock that I saw at the top of the cliffs at Malham Cove when I was in England in 2009. Observe:

Just imagine that those are my feet, not Kate's

So anyway to wrap up this already extremely long post, after picking up the pace and seeing some really cool views and possible campsites, I hit a real trail again-- the trail that leads to the top of Squaw Mountain. The only problem was that it was covered in snow. I am sick of hiking through snow. I mean, I'll do it gladly if I'm ready for and am wearing the right stuff, but with beat up running shoes and cotton ankle socks? It's just not that fun. But I wanted to summit Squaw, so I did finally and spent some quality time up on one of my favorite spots in the world, eating fresh blackberries and beef jerky and enjoying the sunset over Utah valley.

But I had to get back down somehow. I called up Jeff and as it turns out he and Kate last year didn't go back down the way they came... I mean who wants to bush-whack downhill in the dark? They just hiked down through Rock Canyon where there's an actual trail and had Kira Jeff's wife pick them up. I did the same, except I had Jeff pick me up at the mouth of Rock Canyon.

Problem was that the Rock Canyon trail was completely under wet, soft snow all the way down to the meadow...where it was under wet, sloshy, melting snow that turned the meadow into a big swamp. My feet were completely water-logged with icy snow runoff. This gave me unwanted flashbacks to last year when we hiked Y Mountain in the snow and I didn't pay attention to how cold my feet were getting as we ran down... and I damaged the nerves in my heels and there wasn't feeling there for several months after. So I was a little more aware of that problem this time and I just booked it through the icy snow swamp to get to dry ground. Once I got there I took off my shoes and socks and tried warming up my feet as I wrung the dirty water out of my socks.

With my shoes and socks back on I started down the last bit of the trail but discovered that the trail was unfortunately a natural channel for the snow runoff off the back of the mountain. The trail was once again basically a raging stream of cold, muddy water. (sigh) So I just booked it down the mountain leaping from one side of the channel to the other until the water ran off into the main stream and could finally get out. I ran most of the way down through the canyon and got to the parking lot as it was getting dark. Jeff arrived to pick me up with a can of A&W and a J-Dawg (best brother ever) and so it was. All in all the hike was about five and a half miles. I won't tell you how long it took me.

Looks like this will take a week for anyone to read all the way through, so I'll save the hike I did the next week to Maple Flats for later. If anyone reads this whole thing they get a candy bar! (Maybe. If you ask maybe I'll get you one.)