Mt. Timpanogos on one icy night

Taking a break from all the late, late posting about the trip . . .

This weekend I met a guy at the top of Mt Timpanogos who said to me, "My friends were going for a hike, and I thought, I'm up for a little adventure--I got more adventure than I planned on."

We thought we wanted a little adventure as well. We were planning on hiking the Narrows in Zion's National Park this last weekend, but due to high flash flood warnings we decided that it was not the best weekend to take on such an hike. Because we didn't want the weekend to be a total bust we decided to do a midnight hike up Mt Timpanogos to watch the sun rise. I have made the hike twice, but neither Joe nor his friend Tim (who was hiking with us) have ever hiked the mountain before. Even though Timp. is approx 10,000 feet, it is not a particularly difficult hike (or so I remembered). We set off hiking just as planned at about 12:00 a.m., but what we didn't calculate into our scheme is that Utah had record high snow packs this year. That translated to a hiking trail still covered in snow, frequent stream crossings, and a very nervous group of 3 hikers. Had we been hiking in the day (e.g. the way down) the snow would have been slushy and not at all scary, but we were hiking at night. The 'slush' was frozen solid and many parts of the trail were absolutely covered in ice (with steep cliffs to catch us if we slipped . . . cliffs of unknown height because it was dark . . . all we knew is that it was steep and slippery). After we had hiked for awhile, we knew we couldn't turn around because that would mean hiking back across the ice in the middle of the night, so we pressed on. About 1400 ft from the top, the trail levels off into a bowl of sorts for approx. a mile before the trail continues ascending to the peak. At the end of the bowl the trail was totally and completely lost in the snow, and we could not find a reasonably safe way to continue on to the top. Plus, due to the extra time spent trying not to slip off the side of the mountain the sun was already rising. We decided to cut our losses at that point and make camp for the night (or morning).

Luckily, it was a beautiful sun rise and we all had a good 4 hours of rest before we woke up to a burning hot sun which would turn the ice back into slush for our hike back down. Even though we never made it to the summit, it was spectacularly beautiful on the way down. The mountain was covered with streams of water and waterfalls running right through the snow (and we all made it home safely). The moral of the story is this: Don't do a midnight hike up Mt Timpanogos without researching the weather conditions first, or at least bring an ice ax with you :) Oh ya . . . Joe was wearing his Keens . . .