Mt. Timpanogos

When we were in Utah a week and a half ago, we tried to climb Mt. Timpanogos. We started at the American Fork canyon trailhead and climbed for 4 hours. The last 2.5 to 3 hours of hiking was in the snow. The trail was packed down reasonably well at first, but eventually we were following in deep footsteps in the snow, which is really exhausting. Our feet were wet and cold and our legs ached. I just keep telling myself that I had to keep taking steps.

We finally got to a point where it didn't seem safe to keep going without hiking poles. We could see the summit 1000 feet above us, but we needed to walk across a hillside in deep snow and there was a huge drop off with sharp rocks at the bottom to one side of us. There were a couple other people near where we were, but no one was trying to go much past that point. By then we knew we wouldn't make it to the summit anyway because we were approaching our 'turn around no matter what time' - the latest that we could turn around and still make it back for the rehearsal dinner. We were secretly relieved that we got to turn around 20 minutes early because we were so tired.

The hike back to the car always seems to take forever. The scenery in the canyon was spectacular. We stopped and took a lot of pictures.

View of the summit from where we turned around:

The trail through the Aspens:

The view on the way back down the mountain:

Ed hiking with the summit in the background: