Baldy: a retrospective

despite my neglect, I'm determined to finish my so-called "back to the future" series. so here is the beginning of a number of sad tales in which we forget the camera on some rather exciting trips. partly for our record, we wanted to reminisce about all our fun camera-less hikes since almost every saturday last semester, we took a long hike to escape from school (mike goes crazy from math and physics if we don't summit something on the weekend). i thought it would be entertaining to have a comparison of my memories of the trips as compared to mike's. enjoy and if you have any suggestions of future hikes, we're always looking for new places to go!

Sarah: (from a writeup for my winter camping/wilderness writing class) "On a sunny Saturday, we began the hike to Mt. Baldy’s summit in the mid-afternoon light. Mike and I have a bad habit of starting too late in the afternoon to meet our goal of summiting, but ignored this obvious indiscretion and began our trek through the canyon to the base of a ridgeline we had scoped out using Google Earth and careful monitoring of avalanche reports. South facing was the best that day, and so we commenced, first through mud and then on to snow. During the ascent, Mike kicked out footholds with his shoes and we stair stepped up the steep slope. As the sun began to set, we could see the goal that had previously been shrouded by our hard work getting up the base of the mountain. Knowing that darkness would not be our friend, we stopped at the closest tree, the summit in sight but unattainable. The steepness of the slope we had just climbed left only one option…glissade. With shortened trekking poles in hand, we gradually slid down the mountain face utilizing self arrests when feeling out of control but sometimes just to practice our skills to pretend we had the ability to descend a glacier of massive proportions**. When the slope mellowed, we strapped on the snowshoes we had packed up and finished the descent.
**post-script: one of my fondest memories of mike is the way he turned around every 5 or so minutes while we were sliding down the mountain to make sure i was okay. he had the sweetest look in his blue eyes, and I was pretty sure then that I loved him because he so obviously cared about me (though I held out on expressing that feeling until he took the plunge and was glad I did...mmm, happy memories)


Mike: Sarah and I got our typical late start but couldn’t pass up the opportunity to hike the ridge we had been looking at for the past few weeks with perfectly green avalanche reports on all aspects. With about 2.5 hours of sunlight left we started at the parking lot below dry canyon and were on the trail just in time to meet another climber coming down from a bigger climb on Timpanogos. After about a 45 min. of hiking we reached the steep ridge that runs up the south side of Mt. Baldy and turned off the trail. After some steep scrambling through snow covered brush we achieved the ridge with deeper snow. True to the avalanche report the snow conditions were perfect and we were able to kick steps straight up the ridge, crisscrossing the glissade tracks of someone who had previously descended the ridge. After about 1.5 hours on the ridge we were about 100 vertical from the false summit on Baldy’s south side. We watched the sunset and strapped on our snow shoes, deciding to call it a day in order to avoid climbing on the steepening ridge in the dark. Because neither Sarah or I had an ax, we shortened our trekking poles and used them with the crampons on the snow shoes to control the glissade down. The ridge was pretty steep feeling at points and Sarah took a little coaxing at first but soon was glissading like a natural. In about 25 min we were at the bottom of the ridge with very numb bums (and vows to buy new snow pants) but big smiles.