Earlier this week while on my daily morning hike, I came across a new trail that I explored. One part led up into the Mount Timpanogos Wilderness and the other part led to a water pipe that is nestled in a crevice of the cliffs and makes it way up far and presumably flows down into the Provo River in the canyon below. Check out the post about that morning.
As has been well-established on this blog that I have a pretty good fear of heights, also known as acrophobia. A friend accompanied me on this return visit. She does NOT have a fear of heights, in fact, she is more like a mountain goat. She just bops around like its nothing.
We hiked in the 1.7 miles up to the intersection of the pipe and the end of one section of the trail. We dropped our packs and climbed up the steep path that houses the pipe. I went up first and made it to the rope that was installed by whoever put in the pipe to help them get up and down.
While sitting at the point, my mountain goat friend just starts walking up the steep incline without the rope. I called her out on it so she then grabbed the rope and pretended to need it while she climbed. I caught the whole think on video.
At this height on the side of the mountain, I was starting to freak out. She had darted past me and was scurrying around the cliffs exploring the scene.
I was so freaked out that the best I could do was to shoot 2 pictures and a 2 second video. All three can be found below.
While I was freaking out at level 1 of the climb, my friend was off making more discoveries. She found another rope, another pipe and lots of cool scenery. She was exploring for about 10 mins. During that time, I was able to carefully and pathetically scooch up one more level. The move equated to about 3 feet higher than I was before.
When she came back after her tour around the upper level, we decided to head back down to continue our hike up the other trail.
Since I shot video of her climbing up, we decided that she would shoot video of the descent down. Of course, it got a bit silly.
Once we got back on the trail, I knew what was going to happen. she was going to be mesmerized by the big gray rock. You can see her photographing it below. We had fun climbing on it and taking pix of each other.
We came to a small rock on the trail. Took a rest and then decided to head back home. My friend is shown below at this spot editing some of her pictures. The scene behind her is fabulous.
We will need to come back this season and hike the miles into this wilderness. I am looking forward to it as I love the open spaces, even if bordered with 11,000 foot mountains!
Stay tuned.
The Umenum 