Lost Creek Canyon Hike

Last Monday was my day off, so I decided to get out early and do some exploratory hiking.  In other words, check out some new trail and/or canyon and do a little scouting around.

There's a canyon on Timp's south ridge that has intrigued me for the last couple of months.  On my runs in January and February through Provo Canyon I kept looking north and seeing this extremely wild and forbidding-looking canyon leading straight up into Timp's higher reaches on that south side.  My brother also said that he's been wanting to explore up there for quite awhile.  Here it is (my photo):

Lost Creek Canyon

Monday being an incredibly nice day, and me being in quite an adventurous and reckless mood, I decided that Lost Creek Canyon (for so it is named) would be my hike of choice.  So it's on the north side of Provo Canyon, but the north side doesn't really have parking, and I didn't really know how to make the approach to the canyon. So I parked on the south side at Nunn Park (close to Bridal Veil Falls) and starting hiking east. I knew that I needed to get to the other side of the highway, I just didn't feel like playing frogger and hoped I could find a more adventurous way across.

I eventually found what I was looking for: a drainage pipe about 250 feet long leading underneath the highway, big enough for me to crawl through. I was like, "What would Bear Grylls do?  He would definitely crawl through the drainage pipe, and probably eat anything he found inside."  So I crawled through it.

Sadly I didn't take a picture of it, but I shimmied my way through that crawlspace going uphill all the time, and then realized at the other end that it was actually completely overgrown and covered by some sort of bush. So I had to snap a bunch of branches and then army crawl through the snow to get out of there.  I had scarcely gone five feet from the mouth of the pipe before I looked up and was greeted by the decaying carcasses of two dead beavers.  Here's one of them.

Even Bear Grylls wouldn't find anything to eat on this guy.

Anyway, I left the pitiful beavers to continue rotting and moved onward.

I was by this time not really sure where I should go, because from my cursory glances at Google Earth I knew that the best approach was definitely from the west. But I was quite a bit to the east, and I thought I remembered a path leading up into the canyon from the east, so I went that way for a bit.  Yeah, going that way got old really fast.  I cut uphill trying to bushwhack and immediately got cut off by thick scrub oak. There was no way I was going to make it through there.  Luckily, I found a game trail left by some nice deer, which had picked its way very carefully through the scrub oak to the west, marking really the only way through.  So I followed the deer trail through the scrub oak until I actually made it to a path/road, which brought me to a genuine road type of deal leading straight up into the canyon.  And I mean straight up.

It went straight up till I was close to the mouth of the canyon, and then dumped me out into the "Lost Creek", which is really just a drainage that comes down off of Timp.  From that point on, I just clambered up the canyon from rock to rock, with the water trickling on down past me.  I walked on the bank from time to time when it was possible, but the snow was really deep.  Luckily I was wearing my trusty new gaiters that I got for my birthday, so I didn't get any snow in my shoes.  After a bit I arrived at a pretty sweet-looking waterfall, which I'm sure looks a lot cooler in the spring when it's not so obscured by snow.  I tried to take some pictures, but the sun and its reflection off the snow made the pictures look kind of washed out. All the same, here are a few:

Looking down the canyon at Cascade

Looking up the canyon

Waterfall from the best angle I could get... the snow down at the bottom blocked that view of it.

There was a lot of cool snowmelt going on.  Also mini-landslides, I almost got hit by a couple of rocks here.

Looking down the canyon

And so, looking back down the canyon after scrambling around at the waterfall area, I decided to turn around.  This was supposed to be a something like a scouting expedition anyway, and once I got above that waterfall it would have been much more difficult and much wetter.  So anyway I set off at a much quicker pace down the canyon, which was a lot less careful, and a lot more nonchalant, and so forth--which explains how I accidentally slipped and fell into the stream at one point.  Luckily the creek is not deep, and all I got wet was my butt. All the same, it wasn't pleasant. I scraped up my thumb pretty good.  So after hauling myself out of the river, I did some emergency first aid (rinsed it in the stream, dried it off with my bandanna, put some neosporin and a band-aid on it), changed into a dry shirt (I happened to have one in my backpack) and set off again, making it out of the canyon much quicker than I got into it.  And I decided I would just run across the highway rather than crawl through the drainpipe again...

All in all it was a grand adventure.  It had almost everything: bush-whacking, trail-finding, deer-track following, snow, scrub oak, dead beavers, crawling through drainpipes, creeks, icicles, waterfalls, Coldplay, Nickel Creek, Forgotten Creek, blood, water, scrapes, rocks, and dirt.  Oh, and not to mention blueberries and beef jerky.  All it was missing was a summit, and I suppose someone to share the adventure with.  But it was grand, and to be honest there aren't really that many people who are interested in this sort of adventure-- at least not among my acquaintances.  Here's a map of the adventure:

And how I look when I'm on an adventure: