Big Baldy Southwest Ridge
The southwest ridge approach to Big Baldy is a beast. I love hitting it before it gets too snakey. Took Matt up for his first summit. Found a horned lizard on the ridge.
Big Baldy Loop
Up the SW ridge, down Dry Canyon. Big Baldy is still as steep and gorgeous as ever. I think the downhill hurts more than the climb though.
Dry Altar, Down Shooter
I need to wake up in the morning and run more often. I hate it. I feel sluggish and my stomach is off if I eat anything (a jelly donut today). But, getting back home at 9 in the morning having already banged out a great run does feel pretty amazing.
Big Baldy via Dry Canyon
I have bagged Big Baldy via the SW ridge (steepest route), and via Battle Creek Canyon and the Baldy Saddle. Today I tried the final main option, up Dry Canyon to the Baldy Saddle. Dang oh dang. It is steep. 3.5 miles to the top with 3,500 climbing – not evenly distributed. Then, bombing back down. It was a gorgeous day but I was pretty beat up by the time I got back to my car.
Timp Trail Half Marathon Route
Lots of short runs lately, so I decided to see if I was up for a bit more mileage. A fellow professor joined me to run the Timp Trail Half Marathon course. We’ve had so little snow, I suspected most of the route was dry. I was mostly right – a couple patches of wet dirt, some mud, but not bad.
What was bad was my body. Not only did I get killer cramps in both calves and one quad, but one of my IT bands flared up. WHAT?! What is this? 2015? IT bands? Sheesh. In any case, it was a beautiful, but frustrating outting.
Fall Leaves on the Little Baldy Ridgeline
I have been wanting to summit the modest bump of Little Baldy (just south of Big Baldy in Utah County) for a while and have been eyeing the west ridge for the approach. Tim joined on this ill-advised adventure, but the fall leaves promised good views. Indeed, the colors were popping. We went up from Dry Canyon, the wound our way up to the bottom of the West ridge. It was mostly clear – a trail faded in and out but there wasn’t too much schwhack required…until we got to the first summit (there seem to be 2). There was a cairn on the western-most summit, but I think the true summit is just northeast of there. Unfortunately, everything between the two summits was a schwhack! After the taller NE summit, we found a trail, then lost it, and schwhacked over to the Great Western Trail, which I knew was close. From there bombed down to Trail 051, but missed an important turn in the twilight and had to do a bit of guesswork to work our way down to the BST and then back to Dry Canyon. In all, it was a great evening, even if our scratched up bloody legs stung something fierce in the shower!
Exploring the Little Baldy Foothills
Above the Orem Gun Range there is a great set of squiggle trails that lead up to Trail Nr. 051. Between there and Little Baldy I have noticed a series of green meadows that lead up in between the trees and have long wanted to explore them. So, I did. I did the climb out of the gun range a couple times, and messed around in those little meadows a bit. So quiet – I didn’t once see a single person up in them.
Touring a new friend around the foothills
I have been doing my best to seduce a new neighbor (kind of old family friend) to the trails. So far, pretty good. I have taken him up the Lindon Squiggles, around the BST, the Dry Canyon – Altar/Rock Pile loop, the Johnsons Hole / Taj Mahal / GW loop, etc. Good times. I still struggle to believe all of these great trails are just a 5 minute drive away.
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Snow Adventures
Snow has arrived (finally!) in Utah. I have only ventured out a few times, but it has been pretty great.
In mid-November my back tweaked again (see my nightmare injury from Summer 2015). I decided to test it out on the Lindon Squiggles and foothills below Dry Canyon. It started beautiful and ended with a whiteout. I knew a system was moving in, but figured I’d be ok not venturing too far from my car. It was fun to get first tracks in the snow and my Altra Lone Peak 3.0 Mid Neos worked great!
A week or so later I ventured up Dry Canyon a bit – mistake. It was too tracked out and complete ice. Not wanting to descend the steep ice I cut up the Curly Springs trail Nr. 051 and came down the Squiggles. Much better on those back trails.
I hosted the 3rd annual Wasatch Mountain Wrangler Secret Wrangler Gift Exchange and someone was kind enough to hide a gift for me too. Like last year’s gifts, it took up new trails. Mill Creek, Pipeline Burch Hollow, towards Church Fork Peak. My childhood best fried was visiting and he joined me. The last pitch to the Church Fork ridge was a bit of a slow – he snowshoed up – but I didn’t put mine on until the ridge. We headed west a while, but didn’t trek all of the way to the peak. We were a bit short on time, and lazy. How beautiful though! AND, my new Christmas present Hillsound Ultra crampons were AMAZING. My Atlas snowshoes performed great too.
Squeezing Some More Color out of Autumn
I suspected there was still a lot of color up in the hills. I was right. From a distance, the flanks of Big and Little Baldy looked like they were covered by motley patches of multicolored lichen or something.
Trying to Train Without Getting Injured
For the past couple weeks I have been thinking a lot about putting in smart miles rather than just lots of miles. Lots of miles usually just get me injured, plus I don’t have lots of time, so I’m trying to be strategic (and have even added biking to work once a week or so into the mix as a way to work on muscle strengthening and endurance without stressing my joints). Here’s some recent doings.
Two of them were deliberate attempts to put in smart miles.
On May 16, some quick miles to loosen up sore muscles after that Big Baldy madness.
Then, on May 23, I went up the crop circles trails above Lindon with the specific plan to work on slow climbing. This is a trail that has a nice long, but gradual, climb, then a downhill to complete a loop. I wanted to work on transitioning from aggressively power hiking climbs to slowly running them. I did the loop, then did it backwards, then went up and down the BST a bit. It felt great. I will add this on occasions to get some climbing in, but without the punishment of long downhills that sometimes stress my joints.
On May 20 and May 27 I took my next-door neighbor on his first two trail runs. He has been a hardcore hiker in the past (600 miles on the Pacific Crest Trail, the entire Great Western Trail from Idaho to Arizona – the full length of Utah – twice) and puts in a lot of road miles. I convinced him to join me in the hills and I think I’m going to get him hooked!
The Dry Canyon -Altar/Rock Pile loop was great in the morning and things were looking so green!
Then, of course, taking him on the Grove Creek Battle Creek loop. Wow. It is so green up top!
The Big Baldy Vertical Kilometer Challenge
I like maps and I like drawing routes on maps that I can only dream of ever running. I draw them and then challenge others to run them. See all of them at The Professor’s Trail and Ultra Courses.
The Big Baldy Vertical Kilometer Challenge is in my backyard and I tackled it this morning before work. Yowzers.
The SW Ridge of Big Baldy (above Lindon, UT – in-between Dry Canyon and Battle Creek Canyons) is crazy steep. From the Dry Canyon trailhead, it is just over a kilometer of vertical gain over just 2.2 miles of trail. The 2nd mile alone climbs almost 2,300 feet. In all, the climb is 3,330 ft.
I’m not a strong climber but knew I could make it to the top. If feeling strong, I was planning to double it from the meadow at the Dry Canyon / Curly Springs trail intersection in order to also check off the Big Baldy Double (Vertical Mile+) Challenge. (That didn’t happen). But I did do the vertical KM – in 1:36:53.
The Dry Canyon Trail climbs fairly steep for the first .7 miles to the meadow where the Curly Spring trail intersects. I dropped an extra bottle behind a trail there and continued about .3 miles to the turnoff up the SW ridge trail. That first mile climbed 869 feet. Not bad, I was feeling ok. And, that is when the real fun began. The next mile of tiny switchbacks and steep pitches climbed almost 2,300 ft. While climbing I got some great views of Timpanogos and Little Baldy and the valley. About 3/4 of the way up, some clouds rolled in and started to wrap around the ridge below and above me. Then, right around ME. I could see the wisps of cloud moving just a couple feet away. Very cool.
After climbing 1 mile up the ridge, I got to the very prominent false summit (there’s an old flagpole, now laying on the ground). Continuing north, you drop down a tiny little col and then climb NE up a saddle to the actual Big Baldy summit where there is a large stone cairn.
That adds another .2 miles or so. I took some pictures, turned around, navigated down the little bit of snow on the saddle, and then back down the SW ridge. Close to the bottom, I landed fairly hard on a hyperextended left knee. At the meadow, where I had hoped to grab my extra bottle and turn around for the double, I took a moment to feel out the knee. It wasn’t happy and felt like it might be swelling. So, I called it a day and headed back to the car.
It was a short but grueling morning. Very fun. I’ll be back for the double!
More Summer Shenanigans
Thankfully, the back pain from last month did not return and I was able to fit in a number of runs and hikes (not listed here, but on Strava) during the remainder of August.
I ran a bigger version of the squiggly wiggly. Lots of fun.
Some HOT BST action:
An awesome morning run up Grove Creek to Chris Flats. Bagged my first Mountain Goat sighting.
I even ran some pavement. Possibly the first time this year! Actually, it was kind of exhilarating to click off miles at a faster pace than I’m used to, but it was painful.
Plus, some nice blister pains during an attempted Big Baldy Summit. Woot woot.
My New Treadmill: The Dry Canyon / Altar Loop
Twice now, I have run a 7 mile loop from the Orem Gun Range > Dry Canyon > The Altar/Rockpile > Orem Gun Range.
I think it will be my regular treadmill run. It has it all. Runnable flat-ish rolling trails, a good steep climb, and some fun technical descents. The mile drop from the altar down to the fire break road is such a fun single-track. The grass is about chest high or higher so your immediate peripheral vision is just a blur as you fly down the trail – it feels like a video game.
Plus, its pretty gorgeous. I would only change the amount of loose rock on the back side when dropping down to the Altar. I may modify it, park at Dry Canyon and do the loop from there. That would leave more of the nice rolling BST for the end.
GroveCreekBattleCreekCurlySpringDryCanyonBattleCreekGroveCreek Half Marathon Loop
I am running my first ultramarathon in a couple weeks – the Bryce 50k (~31 miles). I have *almost run that far once, and it was slow. I have done a number of runs in the 20-25 mile range, but none have been races. Aside from 2 Ragnar relays, the longest race I have done was a 5 mile Turkey Trot back when I still lived in Nebraska. In any case, I have not trained very well and figured I should put in some longer distance runs in the next couple weeks.
Tempted by continually amazing pictures, I headed back up Grove Creek to the green valleys below the western slope of Timp.
I put out a post for a group run and one guy, Matt C. came. Great guy – great conversation. We headed up Grove Creek to Indian Springs, where I filled my 2 water bottles. Tasty tasty water.
I also accidentally stepped on this guy. 🙁
Then across to Chris Flats, beautiful as ever, and 1/2way down Battle Creek. There, we hit the turnoff to Curly Springs.
After climbing up out of Battle Creek canyon, I needed to pick up the pace and Matt and i parted ways – me pushing forward and Matt looking to drop a shortcut down to the BST.
I ran south to Dry Canyon, took that down to the BST, and followed the BST back to Grove Creek. 13.1 miles! It was fabulous.
