Kings Peak: Trading One Hot Hike for Another
Every year our hiking group tackles Mount Timpanogos. It's become a tradition that I look forward to every summer.
This year, though, the forecast was calling for temperatures close to 100°F at the trailhead by the time we'd finish.
Hard pass.
As much as I love hiking, baking on an exposed trail in triple-digit heat just didn't sound like fun. So the group wisely called it off.
But...I still wanted to go hiking.
Plan B
My friend Deb and I started looking at options that would get us higher into the mountains where it might actually be pleasant.
Kings Peak looked promising.
The forecast called for morning temperatures in the 40s or 50s and maybe a high around 80°F.
Compared to Timpanogos, that sounded downright luxurious.
The plan?
Drive three hours.
Start hiking in the dark.
Climb Utah's highest peak.
Drive three hours home.
Easy, right?
An Early Start
My alarm went off at 1:00 a.m. after just an hour or two of sleep.
I picked up Deb, and we made the three-hour drive to the Henry's Fork trailhead, arriving around 4:30 in the morning.
The parking lot was already packed.
I'm guessing there were somewhere between 100 and 200 cars already there.
Apparently everyone else had the same idea.
The cool mountain air felt wonderful. We actually started the hike wearing light jackets, which felt amazing after the previous weekend's adventure race where I thought I might melt.
"Ah! Ah! Ah!"
For some reason I started counting the people we passed going our way up the trail.
You know how The Count from Sesame Street counts everything?
"One! Ah! Ah! Ah! Two! Ah! Ah! Ah!"
That was me all morning.
By the time we reached the summit, we'd passed 54 hikers.
There were hundreds of other people on the mountain that day, but those 54 became my own little game.
The first 11 miles flew by.
We covered them in about 3½ hours, right on schedule for our goal of finishing the entire hike in around nine hours.
Then we reached the boulders.
Wait...I Don't Remember This!
Somehow my brain had completely erased how difficult the summit boulders really are.
I had absolutely no memory of how much scrambling there was.
Or how slow it was.
Or how exhausting it was.
Apparently my brain had decided to protect me by deleting that information after my last trip. Deb and I had done the Red Castle to Kings Peak loop about 3 years ago. https://hikerdawn.blogspot.com/2023/10/kings-peak-backpacking-17-19-sep-2023.html
The final two miles to the summit—and then the same two miles back—took us nearly four hours.
It felt endless.
Ironically, it was also warm on the summit, which probably doesn't happen all that often at over 13,500 feet. Last time we had skidded up and down on a skiff of snow.
On the way back down we decided to skip retracing our exact route and instead dropped straight through the boulder field toward the saddle.
I'm not convinced it saved us any time.
Learning From Last Weekend's Ogre...
After drinking nearly 18 liters of water during last weekend's Teton Ogre Adventure Race, I wasn't going to make the mistake again of my bottle being too small.
This time I packed a full 2-liter CamelBak plus another half-liter bottle.
Ironically...
I carried way more water than I needed.
The temperatures were so much more reasonable that we never had to refill on the climb to the summit.
The only problem was that I'd mixed electrolyte drink into my CamelBak, and honestly...
I didn't really like it.
Instead of encouraging me to drink more, it made me drink less.
Thankfully Deb had brought a small water filter that let us fill directly from streams on the way down.
Fresh cool mountain water tasted a whole lot better.
Six Miles That Lasted Forever
By the time we reached the river crossing with about six miles remaining, it was finally getting hot.
Those last six miles...
Wow.
They seemed to take forever.
We had talked about running portions of the trail, but neither of us had much left.
Deb's stomach wasn't feeling great.
My deep blisters from the Ogre were reminding me they still existed.
So we stopped.
I took off my shoes and socks and sat right down in the river.
It may have been my favorite moment of the entire hike.
The cold water cooled my feet, lowered my body temperature, and completely changed my attitude.
Before leaving, we soaked our shirts so they'd cool us as we walked.
From there it became a game.
Every stream...
Every puddle...
Every chance we had...
We'd refill Deb's filter bottle and squirt cold water over our heads and the backs of our necks.
It wasn't glamorous.
But it worked.
Not Quite Our Goal Pace...
We eventually made it back to the trailhead after 11 hours and 45 minutes.
Quite a bit longer than our optimistic nine-hour goal.
Kings Peak had once again reminded me that distance isn't everything.
Sometimes the slowest miles are the hardest ones.
The Greatest Ice Cream Tragedy
After six hours of driving and nearly twelve hours of hiking, we had one thing on our minds.
Ice cream.
Google Maps confidently directed us to an ice cream shop.
Except...
It didn't exist.
No store.
No ice cream.
Google Maps has not exactly been my friend lately.
So after hiking Utah's highest peak, surviving another hot day in the mountains, soaking ourselves in rivers, and dreaming about that perfect post-hike scoop...
We drove home empty-handed.
Honestly, that might have been the biggest disappointment of the day. 🍦😂
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