Yes that's right, hike across Utah Lake.After Wood and I were not able to hike Timp on New Years day, due to avalanche danger we schemed up a new adventure. Hike Utah Lake.
After going home and reading up on it it turns out that it has been done before, and is safe if there has been a good cold streak, so we invited all our buddies for the adventure.
Well turns out all our buddies thought we were crazy accept for Savanna and my courageous nephew Chandler. So the four of us started keeping an eye on the weather. After we had a week of solid freezing temperatures we called up Utah Lake State park to get an idea of how thick the ice was. After getting the thumbs up we started our adventure.
To start with we each packed a extra set of clothes, so that if one of us went down they could wear the other persons clothes. We packed plenty of water, food, and other emergency items. Including two ropes, one two tie all of on to and another for emergency.
We stared on the west side of the lake south of Saratoga, after getting through the bullrush we made it on the lake.
The first 400 yards were fairly sketchy, you could hear the ice rumbling in the distance, each step we took at a slow pace.
Once we got out closer to the center of the lake, the Ice was more solid and our pace picked up to a jog. We would see where the ice had been pushed together like fault lines and pushed up massive piles of ice.
There were also cracks in the ice where the ice had separated and new ice had formed. Most of These were very thick and stable.
Once we made it out near the middle of the lake it looked like we were in Antarctica or something, it was very cool looking off in the distance and just seeing ice and snow.
The East end of the lake was the sketchiest, you could hear the cracking louder, and see more of the rivers in the ice. There was one crack that we all crossed very carefully because you could see water without ice that was about 4 inches wide.
Because we were late to help my mom move that day we had to do most of the hike a slow running pace, we gave the kids three breaks the longest being 10 minutes.
This was a great trip and one that we will look forward to doing again.
1 comment:
This was a memory Chandler loved and will always carry with him. He often talks about how fun it is to go on adventures with his fun uncles. Thanks for the memories
Post a Comment