After our successful 2012 Grand Canyon adventure, I came away from Walt's house with a copy of Backpacker to read on the plane, and inside that issue was someone's tale of a hike across The Highline Trail in the High Uintas Wilderness in Northern Utah just East of Salt Lake City. The article piqued my interest, and by the time I got home, I believe I had a message from Walt "What did you think of that article on the High Uintas?"
While I thought it would be pretty cool to do the Highline Trail, further discussion with my potential mates about the length, 70 miles, and the number of passes involved, many, as well as the logistics of getting dropped off at the East end proved to be too much, and so we selected a loop hike starting at Swift Creek Campground. Our timeframe was mid September, after both high school and college were back in session, and as expected, Swift Creek was virtually empty for our two days of car camping prior to our back country experience.
Entrance
My first usage of the Tyvek Tarp
Filling up the sippables
Enjoying our lead-in
A moment of repose
Fire Master
Andy had a nice site
The Yellowstone.
The plan, as it turned out, was a rather aggressive plan :). Recall that our previous week long was a start high, hike low trip, and this was a start high, hike higher. So while I don't believe that any part of the hike was really all that strenuous, the elevation took its toll, and instead of 8+ miles, we only made it 5-6 miles and found a very nice site back in the trees. Something that wasn't apparent planning this trip out was while the trail does indeed follow The Yellowstone, the trail quickly gets up and away from the river, and a lot of the river is in gorge sections that are relatively inaccessible. That wasn't an issue as water draining into The Yellowstone crossed our paths fairly often.
Our second day on the trail had us already adjust our itinerary. Instead of climbing up to the original set of lakes I was interested in, we proceeded further up The Yellowstone closer to its source creeks. The higher we got, the more the land began to open up, and the closer we were to King's peak for our day hike summit attempt. We had one short rain shower, but for the most part it was a fine day to hike. As with the previous day, the more into the day we got, the more evident it was that I could push these guys only so far, and so at one point when it looked like people were starting to look for sites, we sat them down to rest, and Larry and I scouted ahead without our packs until we found a very nice nook to setup camp, and we went back to fetch our gear and the others.
We had a beautiful early day for our Kings Peak day hike, but not terribly long after we set out, Andy turned back. The elevation had him struggling, and we weren't that far into the hike, so he returned to camp and the rest of us pressed on. It wasn't long before we cleared the tree line, and everything just opened up completely, and we intersected The Highline Trail that would take us to Anderson Pass and offer up King's Peak.
