Squaw Peak - 2004

As many of you know, I like to have adventures.  When I heard that there is going to be a chance for fans to go out with Bear Grylls (from Man vs. Wild) and rough it for a few days in the Canadian Rockies with Fan vs. Wild, I knew I was pretty much the perfect person for the contest.  Part of the application process is to show links to three adventures, so I’m going to write about some of my adventures in a few blog posts so that the producers can come see what I do and what makes me tick.

Part One – Squaw Peak 2004

I’ve always liked to climb.  From before I could walk, I would climb up whatever I could reach.  Here’s a picture from when I was just a little tike.

Shortly after my mission I convinced Adam Stoddard to climb up Squaw Peak that overlooks Provo.  Unfortunately, as is the case with many of my adventures, we didn’t take a camera (we were busy trying not to die), so I’ll recreate it as best I can.

Here Adam and I are.  I’m on the left, Adam is on the right, and we are both wearing some sweet flea market hats.

Here’s our goal (image from Mick’s Mountain Page):

We drove up to the base of Rock Canyon and then took a hard left and started walking up the hill.  Here’s approximately our view, courtesy of Richard:

Since we really hadn’t planned on anything other thank marching to the top, we just started walking up through the trees until we got to the base of the rocks (approximately at the bottom of the picture).  We had roughly planned out a route from the base, but since we didn’t have any maps or pictures and it’s kind of hard to get a good feel for where you are on the side of the mountain, we just kind of meandered our way up.  It took about three or four hours, but we made it pretty much to the top approximately following this route.  As a side note, the route is wrong.  I’m just drawing it based on my memory of the trip and we really didn’t know where we were, so the route is just to give you an idea, not to follow.

The peak, from a distance, looks very sturdy, jagged (even romantic) and granite-like, but it’s not.  It’s actually in layers with sections of flaky rock and then more solid rock.  The area that we went across up at the top is where a flaky section had pealed away and so there was a kind of a ledge.  Keep in mind that we went on this climb kind of on a whim and definitely didn’t have any idea what the top was like, so we didn’t have ropes or any sort of climbing gear.  Thankfully, though, neither one of us has a fear of heights.  The ledge we were on was probably only about 25 feet from the next small ledge, but a fall would have most likely sent us tumbling at least a couple hundred feet until our blooded corpses would have bounced to a stop.  So, I was in the lead and Adam was right behind me as we inched our way around the edge of the peak.  See right where the line ends?  Imagine that point is kind of like a wall that juts out and separates the east and west sides of the peak – right when I stuck my head out around the wall I got plastered with some wind that was probably going 50mph and gusts were probably closer to 70.  Needless to say that without ropes and no idea what was even up further, we turned back and went the lame (aka safe) way to the top.

When we got to the top we found a pretty large and flat area so we spent some time trying to fly with the wind (it didn’t work) before we headed to the Squaw Peak Overlook where Megan was going to meet us in a car to take us down.  Only problem is that the Squaw Peak overlook is nowhere near Squaw Peak. 

Adam and I decided to try and find the overlook so we headed North on a trail for a couple of miles.  The trail kind of fizzled out and we really had no idea where we were.  We did have intermittent cell coverage and we could see the valley when we walked west, so we weren’t ever “lost,” just kind of misplaced on the mountain.  We called people down below and had them look up and try to see us and give us directions, but that didn’t work.  Eventually, we just found a nameless canyon and headed downhill. 

Along the way we saw some beautiful pines, a little creek and an abandoned camp.  We like to think that it was a former hideout used by some escaped convict (or even better, someone who escaped from the criminally insane section of the state mental hospital which is just a few miles away), but it could have just been a hobo camp (for the Utah County hobos that like to climb two miles up the mountain to sleep each night).  Finally, the canyon leveled off into somebody’s back yard so we walked through across their lawn and found a street sign and Megan came and picked us up.  Here’s a rough map of where I think we might have gone (courtesy of Google Maps). 

We basically walked all the way up to south Orem before we came down off the mountain.  Our little morning hike turned into a whole day, but it was fun.  Plus, we didn’t die, which means that the trip was a success.  Next time, though, we’re taking water.