W100: Mount Timp Looper

Date: June 21, 2018

Distance: 20 miles

Purpose: Clearing my mind for the funeral

When a dear person to your heart passes away, the normal logistics of planning a funeral suddenly becomes much more deliberate. Everything becomes more conscious, more real, as you try and ask if this is what the deceased would have really wanted.

This experience definitely happened with us while planning Mom’s funeral. The most wonderful thing about it was being close to Mario, Christy, and my Dad on such a regular basis.  Mario moved into my Dad’s home (Hegewald Headquarters) for a full 3 weeks. I focused on grieving, supporting, planting, and running. I was grieving in my own heart. I was trying to support Christy and Mario with funeral plans as best as I possibly could. I also really enjoyed building up my garden box in my new back yard for an elevated vegetable bed. And finally, I was feeling an itch to tie my running into my favorite peaks.

In other words, I wanted to carry out my W100 purpose of finding elevated fitness and elevated beauty in the Central Wasatch, both on old and new peaks.

I was able to do both by attacking Mount Timpanogus – from both angles – in something I have dubbed a peak looper. It’s ascending and descending the same peak from different trails, making (or forcing) a loop.  Doing it on the longest day of the year (Summer Solstice) added some new motivation to me. Everything was bursting in color and growth on this, the First Day of Summer.  

This peak is the second highest peak in the Central Wasatch (after Mount Nebo) at approximately 11,700’. It has 2 primary routes: the 8 mile route from Timponookee Campground on the AF Canyon side, and the 7 mile route from Aspen Grove on the Sundance side of the Alpine Loop. I first climbed it with my parents at age 18, meaning my Mom would have been 58 and my Dad would have been 65. Not bad for a semi-retired German couple. My intention was to make a grand loop by the following path: go all the way up via Timponookee, enjoy the summit warming hut, skirt across the ridge line, glissade down the eternal “glacier” (actually a snowfield, as there is no movement inherent to glaciers), past Emerald Lake (where Clayton Cornia plunged into icey waters at age 15) and the associated warming hut (where Kevin and I decided to turn around during a whiteout climb on skis), down the Aspen Grove side, then hop on the road and back to the Timponookee Campground, where it all began, to finish out the loop. I was pleasantly surprised that there was an access trail from Aspen Grove to the road pass and back to my car. It was a real pleasure to not have to run on a narrow, winding, traffic-filled mountain rode after enjoying such magnificent trails the entire time.

One of the things that undoubtedly made those trails so magnificent were the native wildflowers that abound in this basin. Although the real peak would about 1 month away (around July 24 each year), the blooms were already coming on so strong. With the low snow pack winter and the exceptionally warm summer we had, it doesn’t surprise me at all that the flowers were early this year. Specifically, I witnessed:

-        

      Colorado Columbine

-        Silvery Lupine

-        Aspen Bluebell

-        Pacific Aster

-        Sticky Geraniums 

-        Richardson Geraniums

-       Wasatch Penstemon

-        Monkshood

-        Wild Rose

-        Fireweed

-        Showy Goldeneye

-        Indian Paintbrush

-        Common Yarrow

-        Evening Primrose

-        Blue Flax

-        Little Sunflower

-        Rocky Mountain Goldenrod

And probably a few more that I just didn’t recall at the time or now as I write this from a rear-looking perspective. These wildflowers are so inspring to me that I have decided to bring as many of them as I could to my home by planting them in the island of the driveway.

Mecham and Rich and I on a sunrise hike to the top.

Residual snow fields with some ski tracks as well.

Scout Falls with the Sun Burst coming through

This peak feels like something from Glacier National Park. The evidence of moraines, scouring, erosion, and collapsing are in all directions in the upper hanging valleys of Mount Timpanogus. It was a fabulous run, even though I became so tired that I lost my nice running sunglasses somewhere along the trail without noticing or being too lazy to go back 5 steps to pick them up, and even though I fell hard at mile 16 in a true spread eagle fashion right on the center of the trail. The 10+ waterfalls I saw on the side of the trail made up for it.

A very hot day for a 20-mile looper.

My first true peak looper was under my belt and I couldn’t be happier to have been on mighty Timp, even though I was just 3 days away from the funeral of my Mom. The peak seemed to give me strength to speak about her, to remember her, to memorialize her properly.