So last weekend (Labor Day weekend) a few friends and I hiked Timp. I had never done it, and have always wanted to. It was originally going to be my friend Jessica DaCosta, from my nursing program, and a bunch of her friends, and then some friends from my ward, but then her friend planning it got sick that morning, and there was a storm warning, so most of her friends bailed. My friend, Wendy, and her friend, Nate, still wanted to go, so I agreed to still go. So it was Wendy, Nate, Andrea, Cesar (both from our ward), and me. Kind of a random group of friends, but random is good.
So a lot of people hike Timp (Mt. Timpanogos) in the night, to be at the top to see the sunrise. So our plan was to start out in the evening, hike up to Emerald Lake, which is more than half way, camp there, and then hike the rest of the way to the summit for the sunrise in the morning.
It all started when we ended up starting later than planned, and then the trail that Nate was familiar with was closed, so we had to go to a different one. We hiked the wrong trail for 3 hours (to Stewart Falls, and then practically straight up the mountain, thinking we were following the trail the post pointed to, and after risking our lives on the nearly-vertical loose dirt and rocks, decided it was the wrong trail, and carefully made our way back down, with me at the bottom, so going down first, by first unbuckling my pack and essentially throwing it down first...it rolled and rolled and rolled..). We got back to the parking lot, to square one, at 11 pm (started at 8, so we'd now been hiking for 3 hours, and we were back where we started. Awesome.
We regrouped, ate some food (tortillas and PB, thanks to Wendy), ditched the tents. Andrea and Cesar decided to take Wendy up on her offer to take her car and go home. I already had a blister from my poorly-chosen shoes to hike in, so Cesar was so great and let me wear his, so we swapped shoes. So then it was just Wendy, Nate, and me that were going to hike Timp now. We said goodbye to the two going home, and the three of us headed up the mountain.
In another nutshell, we didn't start on the right trail then until 11:30 pm, didn't get to the lake to camp until 4 am. I literally barely made it, after having been hiking then for more than 7 hours that night, it was pretty rough. There have been few times in my life when I've prayed that hard. I was pleading with HF to just get me up that mountain, because by 2 or 3 am, I was completely shot. I had pulled muscle in my hip, my knee wasn't doing so hot, I had a blister on the back of my heel, and I had reached total exhaustion. Physically, mentally, and emotionally. To the point of tears. I was crying off and on, and towards the top I just cried and prayed as I dragged myself up the mountain. It was pretty traumatic. Once at the lake, we stripped down and put on what dry clothes we had (we were all drenched from sweat, even though it was freezing outside), threw down our sleeping bags on the tarp Nate brought, slept for about an hour (that was the dryest, warmest hour of sleep ever...so great), then it started raining.
So we got up, tried making this lean-to with the tarp, next to this shelter we had been sleeping by (there were already campers sleeping inside of it, otherwise we would have been camping in there), but after a few min. we were getting wet. And by now it was POURING, along with thundering and lightening like crazy. So luckily there was the rangers' shelter up there, which we took cover in, wet, cold, and exhausted, along with about 40 other hikers in there. It was basically standing room only. And besides being totally miserable, it was pretty comical, the situation we were in. We waited it out in there, with all the other hikers, for just under a couple hours, and then headed back down the mountain. None of us had any desire to even try to hike to the top anymore.
We went down the other side, down the trail that we originally were going to come UP. Nate thought it would be a lot easier to traverse, and he was right. I was really glad not to re-visit the same trail we had come up. The best part of the whole ordeal was the view when we started back down. The rain had stopped, and the tons of fog that had been present was clearing, the sky was blue, the mountain was covered in green vegetation, and it was absolutely beautiful. That made it all worth it.
3 1/2 hours later we made it to the bottom. Going down was much better than going up, for obvious reasons, but thank heavens. After we were woken up by the rain after getting only an hour of sleep, I was very worried that I wouldn't be able to make it down very well, having only slept that long, when that was what I was so lacking the night before, making getting UP the mountain extremely difficult. But in the shelter, Wendy let me sit down on her sleeping bag, so I sat (while they stood, though there was eventually enough room to sit, but they stayed standing for some reason) for over an hour, which I'm sure helped to rest my legs some more at least, even if I wasn't able to sleep any more.
But I can't even describe the joy I felt when we reached the bottom. SO relieved!!! And after only a few minutes, Cesar pulled up to pick us up, and boy were we happy to see him!
So needless to say, we were pretty dead by the end of it all, ha. Miserable night, but funny to look back on all that happened. :)
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