Exploring the Mountain West
A friend asked me to join him on a “bucket list” item — to backpack a high route through the Wind River Range, from North to South. We’ve been planning and preparing all summer and completed the trek in the latter part of August. Here’s my unusually verbose description: Day 1 (Friday) Our caravan left…
Utah has been under a heat wave this summer and it is contributing to our poor drought conditions. But I needed a getaway and have been hankering to get out to the west desert and the House Range in particular. The range is famous for its limestone cliffs and caves, and in particularly for the…
Northern Utah is still socked in with late winter snow so I took another trip down to the San Rafael Swell to take advantage of the high desert weather and lack of snow. Temperatures were in the 20s overnight and up around 40 by day, so I chose to tackle a big hike in the…
I chose Capitol Reef in particular because so much of the park access is from paved and maintained roads. Given this was a early January outing I wanted to make sure that a little snowfall didn’t get in the way. In the end, however, the snow won, and turned me around short of the peak….
The crux of this hike, at least in winter, is the crossing of Dirty Devil River. Normally this is a low-flow river in a predominately sandy watercourse, perhaps knee deep. I planned to hike down the 6 or so miles from Burr Point, then cross the river and hike up through Happy Canyon, returning by…
I have a friend who has been caving for his entire life, on six continents, and frequently thousands of feet deep under the surface. He is known for his speed-based caving style, traveling through vertical alpine caves with limited gear and food, choosing to exchange the usual heavy loads and slow progress for speed and…
I haven’t explored the Sawtooth Range much, preferring to stick with the less-traveled White Cloud Range just to the east. Early on I remember driving down Highway 75 between the two ranges and stopped at the famous Redfish Lake to take in the view, only to find that the huge parking lot was full of…
I haven’t been to the Wind River Range for about a decade, but one memory persists from my last trip with my young son — it was a day hike from our camp near Big Sandy to a high lake below a very impressive peak. I wasn’t even sure of the peak’s name until I…
This one was personal. Two years ago I tried to reach Hondu Arch based on a two-sentence description in an old guidebook, but the route ended up being quite high-risk and I had my two teenage sons along. We turned around before reaching the arch and made our way back down the dangerous south canyon…