Sunday, September 14, 2008

I Hiked a Mountain!

    Well I'm not sure what got into me and my roommate Kristi, but last week we decided that we wanted to hike Mt. Timpanogos. . . I know, we are crazy!! We recruited two other people, Jared and our other friend Alyse, so on Saturday morning around 1 AM we started our insane adventure of doom!!! The trail from the bottom to the summit is about 8 miles long, so we planned on taking 4-5 hours to get up, we left so early because we wanted to make it to the summit by sunrise. 
    Anyway the beginning of the hike was fairly uneventful and consisted of many switchbacks that threatened to kill my legs! First of all, I'm way out of shape and secondly, those switchbacks were steep! But we finally made it to the base of the last cliff. Our trust tour guide Jared decided that to get up to the summit we would have to hike up a couple of glaciers, since that was the way that he got up when he hiked Mt. Timp. last year. Little did we know that hiking a freaking glacier would be so much dang trouble!
    We started up the first one, and it wasn't that steep, so we were able to get up with no trouble. The second one however, was extremely steep. . . according to my mathematical expertise I'd guess it was about a 45 degree slope on that baby!! (okay I don't know if it was really that steep, but it was probably pretty close!) After going up part of it, we realized that there was no way we were going to be able to make it to the top, so we started crossing it to get to the edge where there were rocks that seemed to be more stable. As we started climbing up the rocks though the kept sliding down and it was actually kinda scary. Well considering I am a weird girl, and I love adventurous stuff, climbing up a steep glacier and working our way up sliding rocks was pretty fun! For Kristi and Alyse it was different. They got pretty scared and they were kind of freaking out, which I don't blame them since it was dark outside, we couldn't see very well with our flashlights, and technically if you fell you'd slide down the glacier of doom and hit into sharp pointy rocks at the bottom! Anyway, Jared and I helped the other two get up to a big boulder that was stable and we all huddled together since it was dark, windy, and FREEZING!! Alyse ended up calling 911 because she was worried that we wouldn't be able to get down. I thought it was kinda crazy, but I wasn't going to try to stop her because she was on the verge of a having a nervous breakdown! So she calls them up and tells them that we were stuck on glacier, and they told her to have us stay there and they would put the search and rescue team on call. It was like straight out of a movie I tell ya! "Four college students stranded on an icy glacier with no way out. . . One wrong move and they could fall to their death!" haha it was all just kinda crazy! 
    Well we stayed on our boulder until the sun came up and we could see that we would probably be able to make it down safely. So we called the search and rescue team and told them that we would were going to try to make it down ourselves and that we would call them again at the bottom to let them know we were safe. To make a long story short, we made it to the bottom of the glacier (after a good hour and a half!) and then we got down the rest of the mountain just fine. It was the a pretty adventurous trip, but it was also alot of fun!! I probably won't do it again for a while, but I do want to make it to the summit, so I'll for sure be climbing in the future at some point.
    That's about it though, our crazy hike of doom! I'll post pictures later cause I gotta go to church now!

1 comment:

Brittany said...

I met one of your cute roommates last night. I can't remember her name....McKell??? Anyway, we were on a group date together.