Soggy Bread & Buttered Toast: Hiking

Memorial Day weekend was quite the adventurous one. On Saturday we drove up early to watch the Hill Air Force Base Air Show: Warriors Over Wasatch. The weather report said it'd be in the low 60's with a few rain showers but we (and thousands of others) were not prepared for the dump we received. After a few sweet stunt airplanes wowed the crowd with tricks, around noon the winds picked up and it started to rain--hard! Most people ran for cover or ran straight back to their parked car, which was at least ten minutes away for everyone. We found shelter under an f-15nd tried to wait it out there for a while but the children were so soaked to the bone and shivering we thought we'd better go get warmed up in the car.

By the time we got there you could literally ring out every blanket and piece of clothing we were wearing! Long story short, we spent several hours getting out of the clogged-up parking lot and drying off/warming up just to drive straight back in to catch the last few hours of the Thunderbird show and wander the around the parked planes when the weather had cleared. Jess, Jason, Bryan and Dylan were all brave enough to meet us there, though it was a hoot trying to find each other. They all came back to our house after the show and we had a late-night BBQ. It was a very memorable day.

The weather was perfect on Monday. We had discussed doing a few different hikes up Millcreek/Big Cottonwood Canyon but by breakfast Rod and I had come up with a better plan. For our date on the previous Friday evening we found a road that went halfway up South Mountain and hiked up the trail to the top of it's peak. It was quite steep but took us less than an hour and a half to climb and descend it. Though it's only a mere 6600 feet (hardly a hill around here!), it's the peak we look at everyday from our kitchen windows and have always endearingly referred to it as Boynton Mountain...or Boy'N Mou'N if your from Utah. We figured it'd be a great little hike for the kids, especially if we added a great motivation factor! So we spent the first part of the morning digging up the materials: a small red tablecloth, some white paint, a ten foot piece of PVC pipe, a pair of grommets and a few zip-ties to make our very own....Boynton Family Flag!

We had noticed a post pounded in at the top when we were up there three days before and it ended up being the perfect spot to stake our claim to the mountain. The boys did so great on the way up and had a lot of fun exploring on the way down. Rod and I were proud as peacocks seeing the flag wave in our absence and wondered why it ever took us so long to get us all up there (we attempted it four years ago). Now we gather every morning to see the little flickering speck from our deck.

Ending the day off on a Thanksgiving Point 25cent cone and a juicy In N' Out didn't hurt either.

After all was said and done, Juni woke up and was appalled that she had missed out on all the fun.

Here are the basics of our midnight escapade.

Been wanting to climb Timp again, since the last adventure was about 9 years ago (babysitting for more than 3-hour block is very hard to come by in our neck of the woods, so Rod volunteered to stay home).

Organization of Team Midnight ensues and we get to the trail head about 1am: Carrie, Grant, Taylor, Cooper, Jess, Tom, Tom's roommate, Me.

Even with the lateness in our Summer-onset, we assume entire trail will be passable by the middleness of July that is was. We assumed wrong.

We get high on very steep terrain. We lose the trail every other 200 feet over steep sheets of ice. No cramp-ons, no ice-picks--only the random sticks we find to make up for our slick-bottomed tennis shoes. We keeping ~~sliding~~ hiking for hours even though our very lives flash before our eyes in the blackness of that magnificent mountain.