Jan 26, 2011

The next few entires are going to be stories from my life and a little repeat of what I just wrote about.




Climbing Maple Mountain: Ben & Jeff sliding on glacier

I have previously written about my first time that I climbed Maple Mountain, Sierra Bonita, Spanish Fork Peak. These are all three names used to refer to the mountain east of Mapleton. Of course Mapleton residents call it Maple Mountain even though a mountain behind BYU is already names that. Spanish Fork residents call it Spanish Fork Peak and others call it Sierra Bonita. I suppose all might be correct.
Anyway when Ben was 10 and Jeff 8 years of age we decided it was time for us to climb the mountain together. I knew Ben could do it but wasn’t sure Jeff was old enough to make it especially since they would be each carrying a backpack as we had decided to camp part way up in what is referred to as the first meadow. We left in the evening and arrived at the first meadow in time to pitch our tent and to cook supper. We all three slept in a small two man tent that was barely big enough for me but was still Ok.
We slept that night fairly well considering I was starting to remember why I hated sleeping on the ground. I woke first just before it got light. I lay there for some time just thinking about the day ahead of me. I then heard some movement outside of the tent so I cautiously opened the tent to discover a small doe feeding just a few feet in front of the tent. I lay there watching her wishing I could get to the camera but due to the size of the tent all of the gear had been stored outside. I woke the boys so they could see her as well.
We got up shortly after that and cooked some oatmeal cereal for breakfast. After breakfast we took what gear we could easily carry in smaller packs and stowed the rest of the gear in the trees.
We left there and climbed on up to the lake where we stopped only for a short time before climbing on to the top of the peak. As we went around the ridge there was no snowdrift as had been there when I first went up. We continued on to the second ridge where we did find some snow still on the ground. It looked inviting until I slid down the first time and found it hard to stop. That didn’t stop Ben or Jeff though as they went down several times until Jeff didn’t stop in time and went sliding down the rocks instead of stopping on the snow.. I was scared somewhat and ran down to get him getting there in time to stop him but not before he had scraped himself pretty good. That was enough to stop that fun so we continued to the top so we could have our lunch. It was an incredible view as the day was so clear and bright. We enjoyed the view and the rest for some time before deciding to go back down.
When we did go down we stopped on the glacier above the pond and did some more sliding. It wasn’t nearly as dangerous but was just as fun. It made going down mush faster. We used our coats to make the sliding faster and found them very wet by the time we were done.
We went on down to the lake and went salamander hunting. There were a lot of them in the lake and a lot of fun to try to catch. Jeff wanted to take one home but I convinced him to leave them there to swim around in the lake. It took some convincing but we finally left and returned to our camp where we collected our packs and went on down to our home in the valley. It was a lot of fun which we repeated again two years later.