Living on the Wasatch front makes me very lucky, to have over a dozen different canyons and more hiking trails than I could number, with in an hour or less drive from me.
The cool thing about this particular hike was how many of these canyons I was able to see in such a short time. Two of my friend and I started in Big Cottonwood canyon at about 6:00am and 5 hours later had seen Little cottonwood, American Fork, the canyon Wasatch state park is in, and if we hadn’t ran out of time we would have been looking down to guardsman pass. Two weeks earlier I just finished a series of three races that consisted of 2 marathons, one entirely on single track trail and a 16 mile steeple chance so I was taking it easy and just enjoying the with friends. Next summer I will have to do it all.
We hiked up ski resort trails for the first 1.5 miles with .25 mile of boulder hopping to get to the top. I have been up there many times for snowboarding and it amazed me because with out snow the whole mountain is cliffs and boulders and then we turned around and saw where we were going my friend started having doubts if coming with me was good. After talking about alternate routes down they were ok and continued. There was no trail to Mt Wolverine but the ridge was obvious and we followed it to the top. The sun was up by now and the temperature was perfect for hiking. The fall colors were out in full and it seemed that as I ran up the ridge looking from one side to the other there was always something more to see. At the top I had a fun time naming the peaks that I recognized those I have hiked and those I plan on hiking some day.
Mt Tuscarora was just a bump on the way down the ridge to a huge saddle. The ridge dropped 550 feet just to climb back up 525 feet the trail was well used but very gravely and steep. This saddle is a major intersection for trails one went from Big cottonwood to Little Cottonwood another was the ridge trail that was also the Great Western trail that links Big Cottonwood to American fork. The Great western trail stretches from Canada to Mexico and I hope some day to hike the portion through Utah.
Sunset peak was the best peak of the hike it was steep but on a good trail and from the top there are 4 major canyons that we could look down Big and Little Cottonwood, American fork, and Wasatch State park. I also noticed the rock was unique here it looked like salt and was very abrasive and was crumbly it made for a treacherous hike down. The next saddle we looked for a way down because we had ran out of time but didn’t look safe so we went up Pioneer peak to find another way down. We hoped that an ATV trail that came from Wasatch State park to the ridge indicated a trail into Big Cottonwood unfortunately we were wrong and ended up going down a gully that was extremely hazardous. We made it down safely to the ski runs and in all hiked 7 miles saw 5 peaks climbed 2335 feet with a total elevation change of 6716 feet how’s that for a morning hike.
Brighton rim loop
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