Whew! What a hike!
We packed up Friday night, made sandwiches, dried some fruit and wanted to be ready early Saturday morning for our hike. Katelyn invited her good friend, Sophie Lee, and Claire, Drew, Ellie, Finn, Manina and I rounded out the group.
Jacob dropped us off at the trailhead up above Granite Flat campground on the road to Silver Lake Flat on Saturday morning. Saw a total of 4 people in the next 5 hours as we hiked up and over the saddle between Box Elder peak and White Baldy. Technically it’s the Deer Creek – Dry Creek Trail, number 043.
It was pretty tough going, but such a beautiful place. The trail went through aspen forests, some pines, rock slides and boulders and scrub oak. Just about everything you could ask for while hiking in the Wasatch mountains.
Once we got up high enough, we could see over to Mount Timpanogos, and we told the kids that was our next adventure, and that this 9-mile hike was simply training for our bigger effort later in September.
Finley was a complete mess and there were a couple times we had to holler at him to come back on the trail, but he did much better than expected after getting off to a rough start while driving up in the car.
One of the best parts of this trail was that there is a spring almost exactly halfway through the trail. It was so nice to be able to refill our water bottles and not have to carry all that weight. The spring was right off the trail just after is starts sloping downward and heading to Alpine. You can’t miss it.
We had a great time, but we were all pretty exhausted after the 9 mile trek. Megan picked us up at the Horsetail falls parking lot above the Rodeo grounds in Alpine. We stopped and enjoyed some well-deserved Roxberry smoothies.
I think we’ll make this an annual tradition.
MightyJohnsons 