I just had THE BEST WEEKEND EVER.
No joke.
But that’s not what this blog is all about, so you’ll just have to suffer from not knowing why.
Week 21
Wednesday: 4 mile trail run
Thursday: 2 mile walk
Friday: 2 mile walk
Saturday: 9 mile hike
—–
Week 22
Monday: 3.5 mile run
Tuesday: 3 mile hike
Saturday: 2 mile walk
Sunday: 3 mile hash
—–
TOTAL total: 464.7 miles
I’ve finally busted out a couple of hikes in the Logan area since I’ve been back.
The first was Logan Peak Trail a couple weekends back. Damn, that seems like it was a longass time ago.
Anyways, I’ve been meaning to attempt Logan Peak for quite a while, mostly because the trailhead shares the same parking lot in Dry Canyon as the south section of the Bonneville Shoreline Trail. I only saw maybe a half dozen people while I hiking, which surprised me, but it’s probs underutilized because it’s not in Logan Canyon.
The deal with this peak is that it’s one of the taller ones in the range to the east of the town of Logan, topping out at over 9,700 feet. There’s a really nice, pretty well maintained trail that starts at the bottom of Dry Canyon and goes steadily and gradually up the canyon for 3.5 miles or so. It’s forested for most of the way, but opens up higher to some dec views of the canyon and Logan.
And then there’s this.
The trail forks, with Syncline going south over into Providence Canyon and the left fork going up and over into Logan Canyon. That the left fork is labelled Dry Canyon confused the shit out of me and I stood there staring at the sign for a while.
From what I had been able to deduce from the internet, I needed to take the left fork for a little bit, then magically know where to turn right off that trail and head up to the top of a ridge. I bushwhacked for a while in the wrong place before realizing that I had turned too early, but I did somehow actually magically find that turnoff!
I knew from there on out there wasn’t a real trail, but I had expected it to be a little more obvious than it was. I mean, srsly?
I spent a while slowly making my way up the ridge, grumbling and stomping through the bushes. I would think to myself, oh, this is fun, sort of maybe, uhh nope nopenopenope, stupid, this is so dumb, fuck no. I went through this process a handful of times before I gave up and sat down on the ground in the bushes to eat lunch and listen to some cows mooing in a semi-distressed fashion.
It’s no big thang for people from out west to just bushwhack straight up to mountain tops with no trail required. I’m definitely not down with that (yet). My sense of direction is pretty shit, and I’m so used to dense woods that you will absolutely get lost in if you leave the trail, that doing that sort of thing is not my idea of a good time.
So I said fuck it and turned around. I cruised down to my car and that was that.
I did have a spark of inspiration for a excellent new project for this challenge while hiking down. It’s going to be EXCITING and PARTICIPATORY. I’ll probably talk about it soon, so keep an eye out for that.
While my bf was visiting last week, I dragged him out to Wind Caves trail, which I did the very first week of the challenge, to make him suffer from the altitude and heights.
I’m not actually taller than him, I was standing on a rock.
I think he had a good time. With that juniper.
This is definitely what I’ll miss about Utah.
As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, this past weekend was THE BEST WEEKEND EVER. I went to Denver to hang out with my hiking partner from the AT. He was visiting Colorado, so I decided to visit him.
Luckily, the stars aligned and there just happened to be a hash in Denver while I was there. It was the annual high altitude hash, so the trail went up to and around St. Mary’s glacier. Super cool! I went with my hiking partner’s friend, who’s also a hasher.
For some reason, Spam is an integral part of the high altitude hash. One of the hares walked around feeding people Spam with a plastic fork. Cause why the fuck not.
The Denver H3 crew was awesome and we had a fabulous time. Hashing is a global organization and most bigger cities have a kennel, so whenever I travel I always try to visit other kennels. Every kennel runs their trails and circles slightly differently, but hashing draws in a particular type of person so I always feel comfortable and have fun with hashers no matter where I am.
Also, hashing on a glacier. Duh.