West Rim Trail - Zions National Park

I was half expecting the West Rim Trail to be nice and mellow more the first 9 miles and then just wind down some cliffs and drop in elevation down to the Virgin River, but it's not so. Sure it starts out all nice and mellow, gradually dropping in elevation with some mellow rises up and over hills. The ponderosa pines mingle with prickly pear cactus and yucca to make for some interesting scenery. Even more dramatic though is the varying stages of destruction and recovery from numerous wildfires over the years. Some pines would be completely consumed while its neighbor was left unscathed. The cactus seemed to be the least affected by fire since they lay so low to the ground.

The first remarkable stop is at the three mile mark where you have a nice overlook of the infamous Subway. Someday I'll get around to doing it. After that stop you drop down some significant elevation in to Potato Hollow where the fires left only skeletons of large trees that once shrouded the trail in a green canopy. Now they reach out, attempting to snare the travellers who pass in their midst. This area is mostly covered in grasses, and some willow type things that cause my skin to itch. There's a spring in that area that I didn't visit, but I heard that it's full of green, slimey goodness.

From Potato Hollow you climb way up over the ridge. And this is when you realize the trail isn't gonna play nice. After several breaks you crest the ridge and get a great view of numerous canyons on the West side of the rim and you drop into Sleepy Hollow. No sooner do you reach the bottom and are awarded with great views, do you subcomb to the drudgery of climbing an even steeper trail to an even higher elevation than the ridge you just crossed.

Once up there the trail splits and most of the campsites in that area are only reachable from the Canyon Rim section. It's up here that you get to see the most dramatic and extensive layout of canyons that the West Rim Trail has to show. This section gradually climbs upward, but very gradually. The landscape to the East was completely obliterated by a wildfire. The designated campsites in this area are in small patches of pines that weren't affected by the fire.

We had campsite #4. It doesn't have any views from the Rim, but they're a short walk away. I set up my hammock in the trees and napped for a while. The mosquitoes hit hard that night, but the bats came out to feast on those blood suckers. There were several meteors that burned up in the sky while I was still awake to see them.

Next morning we saw the very different views that the South side of the West Rim Trail has to offer. After winding around the rim to Cabin Spring, I stopped to get some water to treat. Cabin Spring is nothing more than a very small trickle with a little pool big enough to fill a Nalgene bottle. There are two campsites right there with enviable views of Majestic Mountain, and the canyons to the South and East a short walk away.

It's at this point the trail starts dropping down a trail cut into the sandstone cliff opposite of Majestic Mountain. Eventually you cross over to the Majestic Mountain side, drop some more, and cross a bridge traversing a deep drainage. Unfortunately the trail climbs again, but only for a short while. Once at the top you can look down into the depths of Zion and see the trees surrounding the Virgin River beyond Walter's Wiggles, and Angel's Landing. Then it's a short trip to Scout's Lookout, and the obligatory jaunt up Angel's Landing just because it's right there and it'd be a shame not to do it. The rest of the way is on the paved trail down Walter's Wiggles, through Refrigerator Canyon, down the hot switchbacks, along the edge of the Virgin River, till you get to the bridge which drops you off at the Grotto.

The Virgin River was really, really nice to cool off in and wash off the dirt & stank of the trip.

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Mt Nebo

Just checked off another county high point. Took the North Route off of Mona Pole Rd. It's a clean cut trail that slowly approaches the mountain while going up and down over a couple hills before you enter a basin on the North-East side of North Peak. The trail does a couple switchbacks before switching to a squiggle of a trail climbing directly up towards the ridge line. Once you're on the ridge, the trail rises and falls on the East slope of North Peak where you get your first good view of Mt Nebo, and eventually curves around to Wolf's Pass. Next is a 1200 ft climb up the North slope of an unnamed sub-peak. Once on top of that, you can see the final trek across a connecting ridge with steep slopes, tricky moves, and a use trail that's very easy to lose. There's a great view of Hell Hole Basin on your left as you cross that ridge. Once across, it's a final push up to the summit of Nebo -- officially 11,928 ft -- with loose scree and plenty of exposure. Best part though, it only takes 4.5 miles to get there, and once you've had enough of a higher altitude experience, it's a quick descent back to Wolf's Pass. The clouds were building the whole trip, and once we were safely off North Peak it started to sprinkle on and off for the rest of the hike.

Maybe next time I'll try it from Andrew's Ridge and see what that endurance fest is all about.

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Mojo Rebuilding on the Ben Lomond Trail from North Fork Park

I've always been curious about the trails out of North Fork Park. There are two that head up to the Skyline Trail, the Ben Lomond Trail and the Cutler Trail. I needed something where I was gaining some good elevation and covering some distance so I could get some of the mojo back that I left on Mt Peale when I had to abandon the summit attempt, and the Ben Lomond trail seemed like a good candidate. It starts out innocent enough -- after you find it in the maze that is North Fork Park (follow the signs to the corrals and park next to them) -- anyway the trail is nice and wide, and in great shape. After a couple miles though,

There's a trail in there somewhere...

overgrowth from the surrounding brush encroaches the trail sometimes making it disappear almost entirely. After 3 miles the trail flattens out a bit and crosses a saddle where there's some good camping and from there you get a nice view of Ben Lomond Peak, and Willard Peak View of Ben Lomond and Willard Peaks. The next two miles take you to the saddle right below the last big ascent of Ben Lomond. It was getting late and I didn't have enough water to summit, otherwise I probably would've done it just cause most of the work to climb Ben Lomond Peak is simply covering the distance to get to the point where I was at. It was okay though, cause my only goal on this trip was to make it to the saddle, and I did that, and I felt I could keep going all the way to the summit which was even better. So I turned around, bushwhacked the trail, ran out of water with two miles left and when I reached my truck I realized the mojo was good. I now feel ready to go out and conquer another one of the ultra-prominence peaks again.

La Sals/Moab 2006

The only reason I'd go to Moab in the middle of July is to climb Mt Waas and Mt Peale, unfortunately neither of those happened. Halfway up a ridiculous route on Peale I started getting dizzy which is really unusual for me even at high elevations, and we were only at 11,500 ft at that point. I continued up another 100 ft or so and only got dizzier, so I made the call to head back (we made it to the red dot in the pic). It was really disappointing cause I've never abandoned a summit attempt before, and I've wanted to climb those two for at least 10 years now. Going down was just as hard as going up. The terrain was pretty steep and consisted of flat chunks of granite anywhere from the size of a book to the size of a poster, all of it loose, and in never ending abundance. That stuff is difficult to walk on, let alone ascend. I think I'll try again when I have a couloir of snow to climb up and slide down.

The amount of bugs flying around up there was astonishing. I think all the flies from all of the surrounding lowlands came up into the mountains to cool off like we did, cause they were everywhere, even at the highest point of the trip, well above treeline. So we chose to spend the rest of the time exploring some of the cooler areas of Moab, like the fiery furnace in Arches, NP and the White Rim Trail in Canyonlands. We entered the WRT from Potash. The evaporation ponds are pretty cool, and below them there are some salt stalactites and stalagmites that have formed in one spot. Our final destination on the WRT was Musselman Arch. It was a fun ride out there. On the way back we went up the Shafer Trail Shafer Trail Panoramawhich I had previously mountain biked down, but have never driven in my 2WD Toyota Pickup (which turned 175,000 on this trip). It was a little nerve wracking negotiating a couple of the obstacles on the way up knowing that if I couldn't get past any one point I'd have to back down what I'd just driven up in reverse and try to turn around with what little wiggle room there is with a pretty good drop on one side. It's something like 1400 ft down from the highest point. A couple sections were sketchy, but the give it more gas method was a winner.

After that we headed back into the mountains to look for a site to camp, but the bugs were too bad so we just explored. I wanted to check out Miner's Basin so we headed up forest road 65 which one book describes as a really rough road, while another more accurately describes it as saying that while a 4WD vehicle isn't necessary, high clearance and solid obstacle negotiating skills are required. It wasn't all that bad, but high clearance is definitely a must. The lake up top is nice, but again, the bugs were too much. We headed down to Onion Creek to camp. It was warm, but the lack of bugs made it tolerable.

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Buckskin Gulch - Paria Canyon

Here's the really brief synopsis of the trip:
Buckskin Gulch - The never ending canyon. The 12 miles seemed like 30. Turn a corner, oh look! More canyon!
Paria Canyon - Cross the "river", get sand washed off feet, climb up the opposite bank, get feet covered in sand, repeat 50 gazillion times.

Buckskin Gulch is really cool. Once you enter the main section of the canyon, there's only one route out, and I didn't even see it cause it looks like the rest of the canyon, unless you're really good at climbing chimney's, then there are plenty of routes out. Only one short section even opened up enough for some trees to grow down there. All kinds of animals fall into the gulch, like snakes and lizards, the occasional rabbit, mice, etc... It's pretty much a death sentence. We came across a bird of prey, not sure what it was, but it hobbled down the canyon in front of us for a ways before it hit a pool in it's path and we scooted around the side.

The pools weren't too bad, there were only a couple that were waist deep, and most had some packed mud from the constant traffic, but then there were the others where you just slid around cause the mud is about as frictionless as it gets down there. They were definitely cold. I think they were colder than Phantom Creek was in February when I cooled off in it.

After 10.5 hours of Buckskin we finally made it to the confluence of the Paria where we began wading through the mighty river *sarcasm*.

We snagged a pretty good campsite and settled in while it got darker, and a mouse made a snack of the thick foil pouch my freeze dried dinner was in. I was super pissed, cause that meant I was out one meal for the trip and it's not like I brought extras. So I slept with my food, cause there were no trees to bear bag it, and it was safe. However one of the mice came back and munched on one of my mesh side pockets. I don't know why, the camera was in there. The camera's always been in there. At least it didn't go through the main pack material.

Next day we did 8 miles or something, I really don't keep track without my GPS, which was left behind, cause it would've proved useless in most of the canyon. Nothing remarkable happened that day, just crossing the river time and time again. Somehow the trickle that we entered at the confluence was getting more and more water in it, despite the fact that there was only one good running spring along that section, so who knows where it's been coming from. The packs were hung from a nice cottonwood, and the mice were left without a meal.

We decided the next day to cut our trip by one day and do two 10 mile days instead of 3 shorter milage days simply cause there wasn't too much to do once you hit camp. After we got close to where we were going to camp to finish 10 miles (at least we thought we were there, you're permanently lost in that canyon your first time through) we decided that since we felt so good we might as well take up the challenge of getting completely out of the canyon that night. I don't know if it was the ibuprofen or the fact that we weren't doing something like climbing out of the Grand Canyon the last day, but it was easy enough to keep on going.

Speaking of being lost, we met these 4 ladies at one point when asked where they thought they were (cause we only had a vague idea ourselves) replied they were 7/10's of a mile from Shower Springs -- which they had passed maybe 3 miles ago, and wasn't really running. Right around the corner was the last reliable spring which was just a slow drip. We found out they were going to camp at Bush's Head Canyon, and we went on our way. We next saw them when there were only 10 miles left at the campground we would've stayed at, 1.5 miles past Bush's Head Canyon where they said they thought this was it, but it might be further down the trail. I was actually using a compass in there to come up with a profile of the canyon sections we were going through and matching them up with the canyon on the topo map to figure out where we were most of the time. One section was easier to figure out because you were dropping through different layers of sandstone and they were listed in the guide map.

So we got out shortly after the sky went black, drove to Page to get some food, rooms and a shower.

With two extra days I decided to go to Moab and get some good Italian at Pasta Jay's. I was going to check out a new riding area I heard about North of town, but as usual, I started driving up the highway and simply decided to keep going till I got home.

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North Skyline Trail - North Ogden Pass

So for the 8th time in the last month, I hauled my butt up the North Skyline Trail to the snowline. Twice I did it on my bike. That did wonders for my riding already. 5 times I hiked it, and this time I threw on a 40 lb backpack to get me ready for my 45 mile trip through Paria Canyon next week. This time around I made it up to 8260 ft, that was a gain of 2500-3000, not really sure, in 3 miles one way. That put me on the ridge that's visible from North Ogden, the Southern-most part of the ridge.

The snow's melting fast, a 300 ft glissade that I was able to do on Monday is now not doable, that was 2 days for 3 feet of snow to disappear. Glissading it was fun though. It was really steep, about 70 degrees and I had to find a curved stick to use for self arrest. It was great.

This is what I glissaded down on Monday, it's all but gone now.

On the ridge looking at the rest of the trail under snow

Standing on the snow...again

Ben Lomond with the sun low in the sky behind it.

Lewis Peak Runoff = Waterfalls

Up until Saturday I had never seen any water flowing on a section of the Bonneville Shoreline Trail I ride frequently in Ogden, but with the sudden warmup, the snow melt on Lewis Peak is coming down. This has created a couple different waterfalls, some right next to the trail which look really bad in my photos, and the water is discolored from all the sediment it picks up. I wanted to hike upstream to see if there was one huge waterfall coming down the massive cliffs that make up the face of Lewis Peak, but I was occupied with getting my ride in, so I passed it up. I couldn't help but do a ride up to where the lower falls were, and then trek on up the creek to find some bigger and better falls. It was rough. There's a trail that kind of disappears unless you know where to look, so I lost it and ended up making my way through the brush oak. It was rough, but it was worth it. The water cascades down several tiers falling off at different angles with each section. The light from the low sun was perfect for getting some good shots. On the way back down I stayed on the boulder scree for a good section, then made my way down to a dry section of the creekbed that is used as a trail. That was a lot easier.

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