This year, as evidenced by my post history, hasn’t been great for me getting out. My usual travel companions have been really busy...and frankly so have I...coupled with a kind of personal funk that has conspired to drain my motivation for things means very little tour time. No Spring tour and no fall tour on the books. Hmm. I’ve had a few day trips and I can’t complain but nothing to really get my heart going and make me remember the joys of being outside with good friends.
Fate has a funny way of sneaking up on a guy. While out on one of my day trips I happened upon an old friend of mine from my early ski touring days. He had just come out of the mountains doing a trail called miller hill, one of the trails in the American Fork canyon area I’ve always wanted to do. We caught up and he said that we ought to catch up sometime and wheel. YES.
A few weeks pass and the strangest thing happened, he actually got in touch. He was headed up to do Mary Ellen Gulch next Saturday and wanted to know if I wanted to join him. YES!!
Well that week didn’t pan out for either of us so...next week? By this point I’ve got a few more folks in on the fun. Im stoked.
Then the weather rolled in. The forecast the morning of was for 3 inches of snow where we wanted to be. crap. Plan b was a familiar, more sauntery trip through the wasatch mountains called skyline drive, up north of Salt Lake (not to be confused with Skyline drive near price). I wasn’t as excited about this trail on account of it being kinda the “well we do hit up skyline drive I guess” kind of trail for the area - its a known quantity. That being said, I’d never done it and the weather in this area looked much better so why not?
Turns out this was exactly was I was looking for. The trail was only 27 miles, ~20 of them pretty easy going. It took us from 930 to 330.
We met up, aired down and got underway - the first part of the drive (in yellow) was pretty uneventful, I didn’t even get pictures, but it was was nice. It’s a graded dirt road with a little bit of washboard but otherwise sedan territory, at the top of the mountain at 7600 feet, a gain of about 2000 feet, we hang a right and gradually drop into a beautiful valley thats has the right temperature, moisture and elevation to produce some really great fall colors. Its been a pretty dry year for Utah so the colors this fall haven’t been too great, but here they sure are.
From there the loop plan was pretty straightforward, but instead of “sticking to the plan” we decided to do a little exploring.
This was a lot of fun but and a lock stickier and trickier than any of us were planning on.
There was one steep winding climb through the trees where I put on my rear locker for luck and Wade put his on because of slip. So far so good!
After that was a steep drop with a spotting obstacle. At the bottom we broke out some lunch and reveled in how little rain and snow we were getting, noting even that it was slightly sunny! Turning out to be a good day.
Time to get back on the path, this road leads back up and around to the front side of the range and eventually to Bountiful peak and past beautiful Farmington “lake”. (it’s been a dry year, did I mention?)
Next stop, is Bountiful peak, the easiest peak you’ll ever bag. At 9259 feet, its not a really high peak and the total vert from the car is probably...oh...75-90 feet.
Still, it’s a pretty great view looking west.
And east.
Also north.
South, eh.
From here is a short drive to Old Ward canyon road.
or at least it feels like a short drive, we’re back on sedan level terrain here and the drive goes by really fast.
Still, the views aren’t bad at all.
Its here we have a discussions about next steps. My friend Garrett is eager to explore a track up ahead on his map, though I’m not convinced it goes through (a lot of the trails in this area are 50 inch width restricted, as we found out earlier when we had to backtrack exploring) and this trip has already taken a lot longer than I told my family it would.
We initially plan to split up, but later decide to head down to the track we had looked at initially for this trip, a side trip off the main road called old warn canyon trail. its rated a 4-5 (easy-moderate) and said it would take 45 minutes. It looked fun and we thought that a sure thing with a known time commitment was better than an unknown with an unknown time commitment. This assumption proved faulty.
The trail started out beautifully, the colors and the terrain were both, for lack of a better word, colorful. Tight, undulating and tunnel like. It was what a Land Cruiser with disconnected sway bars was made for.
The video does it much better justice than the pictures do.
After clearing “big rock pile” and “small rock pile” we encounter the next challenge “big idiot”.
That would be me interpreting the map wrong, where the trail market says “keep left” at the fork we had just reached. The route description was written bottom to top and we were going top to bottom so naturally “keep left” becomes “keep right”, right?
Well, it turns out that there are 2 choices here not one, and “keep left” meant “do go hard right” not, go left.
oops
Very tight, very tippy. Luckily it looped around, otherwise we could have been in a small amount of trouble as it was too steep to turn around and it would have been a difficult backup.
Some scratches and a little butt clenching are all the damage we inflicted. It would turn out to be good practice for later.
Uh, yeah. It’s scarier than it looks.
That runoff in brown is where it pulled out. It’s a LONG roll down to the bottom. (about 400 feet)
It didn’t help that on the passenger side there was a rock you had to climb on so you were tilted TOWARDS the drop, putting more weight on the tires without a road.
I was first across and I think my mouth is still dry from the experience. Thankfully we got all 4 vehicles across safely. I’ve never been more please to drive 20 feet straight.
This trail has been battered by recent rain and snow runoff and frankly I’ve recommended it be impassible on the site where I found the trail. I don’t think anyone should have to suffer the terror we all suffered here and the risk is real and only going to get worse.
Looking at the map its no wonder either, the entire slope is a giant drainage area...it was only a matter of time.
Down towards the bottom is even more evidence of the effect on trails on a mountainside with very little vegetation holding them up.
These used to, very recently, be easy trails you could take a subaru up, now they require careful driving to avoid rolling.
Still. Heck of a trip! Got everything I wanted AND more.
Thanks to Garrett for the invite, sorry the plans didn’t work out like we wanted. Thanks to Wade and Tom and their families for coming and making it fun!
Two Nissans and two Toyota. A first for our group.
Special thanks to Wade’s wife Brianna, a professional photographer, who took many pictures of the trip, including several rare cruiser in action shots. Thanks. Visit her work at https://briannasiddoway.pixieset.com/
