Mt. Timpanogos and Delano

Kathy and I climbed Mt Timpanogos and Mt Delano this past weekend. We had thought about hiking King's Peak, Utah's highest mountain, but then realized it would require more time than we had. King's Peak is a 6-7 mile drive from Bryce and is a 29 mile hike, so we decided we would need more than the three days we had. Mt Timpanogos is 11,750 feet elevation and is about 5,000 foot elevation gain from Aspen Grove trailhead. It is the Timpanogos Wilderness, but is also just outside of Provo and gets a lot of urban traffic. Since it was Labor Day weekend, there were many other hikers, I estimated we saw 300, many wearing BYU sweat shirts or t-shirts. We were given a map with distances by the USFS at the entrance gate which said it was a 6.9 mile hike to Emerald Lake then another 3 miles to the summit from there. But since it only took us about 4 hours to hike up, we doubted the distance. There were supposed to be two trails from Emerald Lake (we only saw one), and we took what seemed like a more direct route over a rock fall, so maybe that is what made the hike shorter than what was on the USFS sheet. There are also a few glaciers toward the top. many were using one of them as a fast way down, either on skis, butts, or foot. A volunteer with TERT (Timpanogos Emergency Response Team) told us they do many rescues for people coming down the glacier. We met two guys later who had done it, ripping apart ponchos that they tried to use for sleds and admitting they hit a few rocks on the way down, ouch.

The view from the top was stunning, overlooking Provo and Utah Lake as well as the rest of the wilderness. There was a shelter, but most of the people found a rocky perch to hang out on. We didn't mind sharing the summit with the others, as they had all earned it. There were several families, but most of the people seemed to be college age.

The next day we went to the Tushars and climbed Delano Peak, 12,173 feet high. What a contrast from Timpanogos. We didn't know what to expect from the hike, and never found the trailhead although we came across pieces of the trail, so we bushwacked. It turned out to be a short hike, we were up it in 1.5 hours. We also had the mountain to ourselves, although there were several ATVs and jeeps tooling along the forest road. It was extremely windy on top, but we had great views in every direction. There was a mailbox with a log sheet and we read through several of the entries. Many of them noted the preponderous of mountain goats, but we never saw any. So Kathy wrote that we saw many velociraptors, hah. We attempted to come down the steep side of the mountain, but then chickened out, but still made a wide loop and came down through a herd of cattle, and one bull who eyed us intently. We kept our distance.

There is so much more to do in Utah and the surrounding states than we have time for. We hope to get in some paddling, maybe in Glen Canyon area, hike in the Henry Mountains and get into the Grand Staircase Escalante some more. We are also planning a trip to the North Rim this coming weekend when my kids come out. We're looking forward to that. Meanwhile, families have gone back home so we expect to see more of the "newly weds" and "nearly deads" visiting Bryce in September, that should be a change of pace for us.