As I worked on
Bargaining for Eden, Mount Ogden kept humbling me. This Utah mountain is big ? in its physical presence, in its story. After a cold, rainy walk along the route flagged for a new road to
Snowbasin Ski Area, I came down with pneumonia. On another walk, I flirted with disaster and dehydration in midsummer heat.
The latter story I nearly paid dearly for, but it didn't make it into the book ? not because it revealed too much but because it didn't quite fit into the final structure. I miss telling the tale, so I'll tell it to you.
One summer, I decided to hike the ridgeline of the mountain, right through the center of the massif. An eight-mile walk, it was close to a five-thousand-foot elevation gain ? and drop ? and not a usual route. My wife dropped me off with my backpack along the Interstate, and I just walked straight up the oak-tangled mountainside. I hoped for game trails, for springs not too far below the ridgeline. I planned for two days of hiking and one night sleeping on the ridge.
The spine of the Mount Ogden massif, from Allen Peak. Wasatch Mountains, Utah.
(photo © 2008 by Stephen Trimble)
Three thousand feet up, in the 95-degree mid-July heat, Spring Creek turned up dry. I was on my last quart of water and wouldn't reach the upper basin of another creek till morning. I tipped back my head to drink and looked skyward past my water bottle into a swirl of soaring phantoms ? nine turkey vultures flickering black above me.
Scavengers carry a warning. "You're in the real mountains, now, pilgrim. Be careful, or we'll come for your putrefying body when it lies bloating in the sun or frozen to marble in the cold." On a modest scale, it's Mallory on Everest. Scott in Antarctica. Jed Smith and Old Bill Williams, mountain men dead along the trail. On a real scale, it's a news story in the morning paper: "Hiker suffers fatal fall on Mount Ogden." "Dehydration claims ill-prepared backpacker."
I could not take my eyes from those vultures. Their black shapes pulled me in. To fill the humming silence, I hollered at them, "Hey, I'm not dead yet!"
I've done solo hikes many times ? all over the West ? making pilgrimages to mountains, photographing my way through canyons, working as a ranger, naturalist, and writer, relishing wildness and solitude. I know how to do this.
After several seasons as a national park ranger back in the Seventies ? including a job at Arches National Park just a couple of years after I first read Ed Abbey's Desert Solitaire ? I'll always be a park ranger at heart. To me, getting to know a landscape means lots of time on the ground.
But on the south flanks of Mount Ogden, even though my view down Weber Canyon revealed the humming suburbs and traffic of the megalopolitan Wasatch Front, here I found no trails, not even game paths.
The Great Salt Lake and Weber Canyon bracket the urban terrace of the megalopolitan Wasatch Front, Utah.
(photo © 2008 by Stephen Trimble)
I pushed through dense waist-high oak brush. On poor footing, I slipped often and fell once, scratched but unhurt. After ten hours, I had barely made the main ridgeline ? just a couple of miles on the map. It was darkening fast. Behind two gnarled mountain mahoganies, a tiny ledge just large enough for my one-person tent became home for the evening. I was grateful.
Sunset over Antelope Island in the Great Salt Lake, from the author's camp on Mount Ogden, Utah.
(photo © 2008 by Stephen Trimble)
My three quarts of water had diminished to two cups. I was light-headed and worn-out. I drank half the water. I looked down to the city of Ogden, where the streetlights and ballfields and boulevards scattered electric stars on the ground. After dinner, I saved my water and sipped single-malt scotch, then lay back into the softness of my sleeping bag, focusing on my muscles radiating warmth, savoring the earthy tang of scotch to forget about my need for water.
In the morning, I drained my water bottle and ate, packed up, and moved along the ridge. The first rush of an alpine stream came quickly, far below me. I heard the fall of the water, saw the sunshimmer of its distant rush. But to reach it seemed too many vertical feet to sacrifice. By the second basin, mid-morning, I was moving very slowly. I didn't know if the drag on my feet was just the exhausting terrain or whether I was dangerously dehydrated and underfueled.
Clearly, it was time to drop off the ridge. Moving in slow motion, with my awareness a little skewed, the stream seemed somewhere far away from my tired muscles, a separate reality. With difficulty I stepped over the last rocks, banked by yellow columbine and bog orchid. I reached the tumble of water, dropped my pack, and drained my first quart in a few gulps.
With my water bottles full, I hiked back to the ridge, stronger, up and over the stegosaurian crests and through meadows. Picking my line, watching my feet. A stark white rectangle appeared, the first bold human mark on my route since I began ? a trail sign at the top of the Strawberry Express ski lift. I contoured below the summit of Strawberry Peak, walked the fresh scar of a road, and found two electricians working on the upper terminal of the gondola. It was 4:00 and they were thinking of heading down the mountain. Did I want a