Night Hike above Brighton and Alta
I'm not sure of the total mileage, but it was at least five miles, maybe more.
So my family stayed at Snowbird Cliff Lodge Thursday and Friday night. Well, they stayed Friday night, but I went out hiking at 10 PM. Wha??? Why go hiking at 10 o'clock. At night! In the dark! Isn't that unsafe?
Here is an explanation:
A friend began hiking Friday morning from Ferguson Canyon and planned to follow the ridgeline that forms the North side of Little Cottonwood Canyon, all the way East to where the ridge line makes a large U-turn above Alta and then links with the Bullion Divide/Alpine Ridge, which forms the South side of Little Cottonwood Canyon. My friend planned to hike the latter ridge to Lone Peak and then back down to the valley. This is no small feat. This is not even a medium-sized feat. I wouldn't even call it a super-sized feat. All I can call it is The WURL. That is, the Wasatch Ultimate Ridge Link-up. I don't know how many total miles the WURL is, but it has to be at least 25. Sounds easy, right. Not so fast. Most of the route is over extremely rugged terrain with serious exposure. The Cottonwood Ridge portion is an all-day affair, and usually takes 12 hours to complete on a quick pace. The guy who invented the WURL, or at least, the only guy I am aware of successfully completing the WURL, one Jared Campbell, did the route in just under 24 hours, and it took him 3 tries to complete it successfully.
OK, so what does any of this have to do with me? Well, I wanted to be a part of my firend's historic WURL, so I planned to meet him somewhere above Alta or Snowbird and go with him part of the way. Since I happened to be staying the night at Snowbird, it would be pretty easy for me to hike up to meet him somewhere on the ridge. Also, he would be hiking over the most difficult portion of the route--Devil's Castle--right in the middle of the night, and he really desired some company there.
I called my friend's wife several times during the day to learn of my friend's progress. His wife and I determined that we could meet at Snowbird later that evening and hike up to meet him on the ridge. She met me at 9:30 PM and we drove to Catherine Pass TH. We hiked up to the pass, believing he may be ahead of us. When got to the vicinity of Sunset Peak, she made a call and found he was just coming off of Honeycomb Cliffs, about 3 or 4 miles back to the North. We turned around and hiked back down to the pass, up Mt Tuscarora, then over to Wolverine. After about ten minutes we saw Joe's headlamp flash over the top of Patsey Marley. We waited about 30 minutes for him to reach us on the top of Wolverine, then the three of us hiked the ridge toward Alta. At the time we met Joe, the nearly full moon was out and accompanied us the entire night. It was about midnight when we began hiking with Joe.
We hiked back down to Catherine Pass, then up to Sunset Peak, then continued toward Devil's Castle. Now, the Castle is no mountain to trifle with. The exposure on just about every part of the structure is severe. Traversing the Castle East to West is not my favorite route. The traverse in this direction requires downclimbing sections in which I find myself dangerously close to the edge of a drop into the abyss. I understand why Joe didn't want to go this way in the dark by himself. The three of us carefully made our way over each section, not taking any unnecessary risks. I signed the summit log on top of the middle summit at 4AM.
What seemed like hourse to traverse Devil's Castle was probably only one, but all the lead up to and the route coming off the West side just ate up lots of time. Joe was spent. He had been hiking for 24 hours straight. I don't know his mileage up to that point, but he was forced to abort his WURL attempt because his pace had slowed significantly. This is the guy that hiked Mt Olympus 5 times in one day. That's 4,200 feet of elevation gain, 3.5 miles up in each hike of Olympus. Wow. Do the math. Yet here I was charging ahead of him and waiting for him to catch up several times during the night. Something was wrong. He was just worn out.
So, for my part, I got several miles of hiking in moonlight and zero sleep when I should have been cozy in my paid-for hotel bed. But I like to think I helped a friend reach a darned impressive long-distance route, even if he fell short of his ultimate goal. | 