Come live in Gallup, where you get two faucet sprays for the price of one.


also, there was a tarantula outside our front door today. awesome.

Fall Hike #2

I took another hike on Tuesday to Silver Lake in American Fork Canyon. (That is not the same "Silver Lake" that is next to Brighton - which requires no hiking at all!)

You go up American Fork Canyon and turn north to the Tribble Fork Reservoir, shown here, (My kids may remember going to the Ames family reunion over 20 years ago when we pulled Grandpa and Grandma Larson's large camping trailer behind our van and camped about a half-mile beyond this reservoir.)

Then I took an "unimproved road" up the south side of the canyon (you would not want to do it without a 4-wheel drive high clearance vehicle) for about 3 miles to Silver Lake Flats Reservoir. There was some great fall colors along the way, but the portion of the road shown here is not representative - lots of large rocks, gullies, etc, that you had to negotiate. That 3 miles takes about a half hour since you can only go about 5 mph.


The Silver Lake Flats reservoir was nearly empty as you see here. The trailhead starts just north of the reservoir

The first part of the trail, for about a mile is through a beautiful grove of aspen that pretty much were still green.

As you get a little higher, the maple trees were bright red and the aspen were getting a little bit of yellow.

Most of my hikes have been hiking south, up canyons that are north-facing. This was just the opposite. It is a south-facing canyon and I hiked north. So, this canyon was much drier than the one I took a couple weeks ago. A few flowers, but not like they were near Lake Mary and Martha a couple weeks ago. Nevertheless it was still beautiful.

One of the big differences on this hike from my earlier ones was the wonderful panoramic views as I came out of the aspen grove and started up the switchbacks that went up the canyon wall. Looking down into the canyons was spectacular. The pictures don't really do it justice.

But hopefully these shots will give you some idea of what it was like.

For late September, it was quite hot and the switchbacks are totally exposed to the sun. It felt like is was in the mid - 80's even though I started hiking at about 7600 feet and hiked to about 9000 feet. It's about 3 miles and took me about an hour and a half.

You cross Silver Creek several times along the way, which you might guess comes out of Silver Lake. It was flowing pretty well for late September, but again, nothing like the streams that I crossed last week on north facing canyons of Big Cottonwood.

It was interesting to me that at the higher elevations, there were rows of bright yellow aspen, just above rows of aspen that were still completely green.

As I got higher, I had a great view of the northeast (back) side of Mount Timpanogos. You can clearly see the glacier that stays there year round.

As I said, all these panoramic views were great. I just had to stop periodically and drink it all in. (Not to mention the fact that also let me rest a while ) :)

And, I got my weekly dose of solitude. I met one couple on their way down as I was hiking up, and one couple hiking up while I was hiking down.

And, finally there it was, Silver Lake. A pretty bluish green lake a couple hundred yards across and 300 to 400 yards long. Two views, one looking south and one looking northwest. The picture below has Mt. Baldy (that's appropriate) in the background. It is 11321 feet at it's peak. If you climb up and over those mountains you are just above and south of Red Pine Lake and White Pine lake that I haved hiked to from Little Cottonwood Canyon.

But! I didn't do that. There is no trail, you just have to go cross country and even at the passes you have to go to about 10,600 feet to get over. Since I hike alone, I don't leave the main trails. I may love to hike, but I'm not crazy. I know I'm 70!

Anyway, as always, I absolutely loved it!!

A Beautiful (and necessary) Fall Hike

Since I have done very little mountain hiking this year (the 35 mile Wyoming Trek with our ward youth notwithstanding), I decided I had better take a day and do some because it is definitely getting cooler and winter will be upon us soon.  I needed to do this!! When I came home and put the pictures on the PC and then checked last year's blog I found out, to my surprise, that I did this same hike exactly one year ago today  (Sept 15, 2010).  Amazing!  I did not plan that.  Maybe that's because it's a fairly easy hike.   You start at Brighton at the top of Big Cottonwood Canyon which is about 8900 feet in elevation and in  less than 3 miles you can hike to four mountain lakes that are all fairly close.  The highest, Catherine Lake is just barely below 10,000 feet.

Well, one year makes a big difference.  Last year at this time, it was very dry.  Lake Mary was just a "pond", most of the shrubs and greenery had wilted and the leaves of the Aspen were turning colors.  (You can see the pictures on the blog of Sept 15, 2010).  This year, everything is still lush and green, including all the aspen trees.  The flowers in the meadows and on the slopes were amazing. 

The only problem with this hike is there were just two many people out hiking on a Thursday.  I must have run in to about a dozen or so along the way and at the lakes.  Way too many for a 6 mile round-trip.  I'm used to more solitude than that in a middle of the week hike in the upper parts of the wasatch mountains. Too many people in my mountains!

So, a few pictures to "document" this little hike.

On the left is looking back across Brighton and Big Cottonwood Canyon after only about a half-mile climb.  On the right is just one of the typical trail scenes along the way.  It was wonderful.

This is the stream that is coming down the canyon from the flow out of Dog Lake and Lake Mary combine.  It's a pretty amazing flow for this late in the season.

Two views of Dog Lake.  The left picture (sorry it is so blurry, I didn't notice till I downloaded it to the computer) is taken from the trail on the way to Lake Mary and I was about 300 feet above the lake (it is shaped like the profile of a running dog).  On the right, at the lake elevation, you can barely tell there is a lake there at all.

Lake Mary is a big lake (as high mountain lakes go).  About a half-mile long and couple hundred yards wide.  If you look at last year's picture you will see that almost everything in this view is mostly completely dry - all you see is rock.  And, even in this view, the lake is down about 15 feet or so from it's high point.  I probably should have gone up in early August to see this lake completely full, because if you looked at my blog from my hike in July to Red Pine lake, there was still lots of snow at this elevation.  Below

you see the water coming from Lake Mary through the opening in the dam on the east side of the lake.  Last year, same point in time, no water was flowing from Lake Mary.  Based on the opening size and the water velocity and trajectory (it was spraying out about 30 to 40 feet) I did some quick calculations and estimated it was flowing at about 400 gallons per second.  (for the math impaired, thats 24000 gallons per minute or about 1.4 million gallons per hour).  That's a lot of water for one small mountain lake in mid-september.

Throughout the hike there were amazing fields of wild flowers everywhere.  On the right is Lake Martha, much smaller than Lake Mary.

It was very evident that with the right conditions, it doesn't take a human gardner to create a beautiful arrangement of flowers.  They were spectacular.  You might expect something like this in the spring, but this late in the fall it was astonishing. Gorgeous fields of flowers were everywhere.

This is Lake Martha from above, and in the upper center right you can also see the south end of Lake Mary (I think you can click on the the pictures to enlarge them - sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.  I don't know why?  Must be magic).  These Lakes are all very close.  My total roundtrip hike was less than six miles.

This little side canyon was so filled with flowers that I walked up it a little ways on my way to Catherine Lake.  And, yes, that is snow that you see in the upper center of the picture.  This is at about 9700 feet elevation and there was still snow in shaded areas on north-facing slopes - in September!

This is Catherine Lake, it is just below 10,000 feet.  I took several pictures but I liked this one that shows the reflection of the mountain top and the sky in the middle of the lake.  You can also see a fisherman just to the right of the tall pine on the far shore line.  He was catching (and releasing) small, about 6 inch trout every few minutes.

I ate lunch here.  It was an overcast day and quite cool (probably mid 50's). Before I finished eating I had to put on my sweatshirt to stay warm.  It also started to sprinkle just a little and from the cloud formations it was hard to tell if it was going to clear up or gradually get worse.  So I decided to start back rather than climb that last half-mile (and about 400 feet in elevation) to Catherine Pass that I went to last year. It looks over into the Albion basin and Alta ski area at the top of Little Cottonwood Canyon.

Oh yes, I had one other fascinating experience on my walk back down.  I could hear a "thumping noise" on the trail ahead of me and couldn't figure out where it was coming from.  As I got closer, I could see pine cones were dropping onto the trail and surrounding rocks.  They would hit the ground and then bounce high into the air.  I thought, who is throwing pine cones at me.  Looked around - no one else was there.  So, I stood and watched for several minutes to figure out what was going on.  One of the really tall pine trees seem to be "releasing" his (her?) pine cones almost all at once.  They were falling at the rate of 2 or 3 every couple of seconds.  I watched for several minutes and it just continued.  I had no idea they did that.  By the way, there was no wind, no rain, nor any other outside influence that I could see that was causing this.  It was as if the pine tree was just releasing those pine cones in a very controlled, closely timed way.  I was amazed.  I have never seen that before.