a room with a view

Santaquin Peak rises high in the mountain skyline behind Sandy and Ray's house. It is the pinnacle of the hills of Cori's childhood. He spent months of his young life climbing up and running down the valleys that stream from its shale summit. There is a well travelled trail that starts a 45 minute drive away, near Payson Lakes. The trail winds steep and steady up the backside of the peak. Cori has always wanted to hike the face to the top. There is a crescent of cliffs that skirts the upper passage to the peak which had always made the trip impossible. 

We decided to make an overnight adventure of climbing the trail and then blazing our own path down the face. Cori is familiar with the terrain up there, and Ray printed us some maps. Plus, we had Cori's house in view nearly the whole way down- our chances of getting lost were very slim. So I didn't worry too much about blatantly neglecting the cardinal rule of hiking: stay on the trail.

The hike up was beautiful. June was a remarkably wet month for Utah and the proof was in the terrain. The landscape was soft and colorful. 

As we neared the top we had to traverse a few snowy patches. Rampant wild flowers were poking through the slush. 

This is me just before the final ascent to the peak right above my head. We made good time and mounted the summit with plenty of daylight left. We phoned down to Sandy's house and they got out binoculars to see us waving from the top. We were able to get a pretty decent picture of the house- considering it was about 5,000 ft below us. It is centrally located in this photo below.

It really feels like being on top of the world up there. The view stretches for 360* and has the effect of looking down on everything.

With the uphill part of our journey completed, we had a decision to make regarding where we would set up camp. We had seen a few places along the way, but that would have meant backtracking a mile or so and then retracing our steps back to the face the next day to hike down. We were both pretty pooped, but decided to begin our descent down the face so as to find a camping spot along our way back home.

Fortunately we didn't have to go too far. We picked our way around the right side of the cliffs just below the peak (pictured above) and came down into a big grassy bowl. It was a perfect spot for the night. We had Santaquin Peak behind us and all of Utah Valley in front. We set up camp. Cori started a fire. We drank 6 packets worth of hot chocolate and spent the rest of the evening boiling snow to use as drinking water the next day.

We sat on that log behind the fire and watched the sun go down and the lights in the valley come up. 



I have only two pictures of our hike down. It was steep. It was absurdly full of brush, bush, felled trees, bumble bees, and all manner of impaling objects. We traversed the ridges using deer and elk trails and then we were on our own heading straight down. I spent most of the time thinking of gospel object lessons about the peace and security of staying on the trail. Then, I very nearly cried tears of relief when we intersected the trail to lead us out into Woodland Hills- my legs were so shaky and tired. But we did it. Something for Cori to cross off his list and I was glad I got to do it with him. Our room with a view the night before made the hike out well worth the trouble.