Journeys: Sunset Peak, Utah

Sunday, October 23, 2005

Sunset Peak, Utah - Hiking

Winter is dangerously close, but this weekend was perfect. It's very possible that it was the last good weather weekend to play outdoors - so i did. On Saturday I biked up Emmigration Canyon to the summit and Little Mountain .. then down into East Canyon and up to the summit of Big Moutain (the last 5 miles to the summit are painful). It was cool to see all the new "Share the Road" biking signs all over the place as well as the improved biked lanes up the canyons. Today i went hiking with Rob. We didn't plan to do a big hike, but we couldn't find the easier trail so we ended up doing Sunset Peak at the top of Alta. It was awesome - great views of everything ..Big and Little Cottonwood canyons, the surrounding ski areas, Heber, Park City, and all the surrounding peaks. The weather could not have been any nicer either. There was snow up at Alta - a sad sign of things to come.

"One final paragraph of advice: do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am – a reluctant enthusiast….a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it’s still here. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, the lovely, mysterious, and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much; I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound men and women with their hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this; You will outlive the bastards"

-- Edward Abbey

"The grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never dried all at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor is ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal dawn and gloaming, on sea and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls. "

-- John Muir

"To be whole. To be complete. Wildness reminds us what it means to be human, what we are connected to rather than what we are separate from."

-- Terry Tempest Williams

"There may be people who feel no need for nature. They are fortunate, perhaps. But for those of us who feel otherwise, who feel something is missing unless we can hike across land disturbed only by our footsteps or see creatures roaming freely as they have always done, we are sure there should be wilderness. Species other than man have rights, too. Having finished all the requisites of our proud, materialistic civilization, our neon-lit society, does nature, which is the basis for our existence, have the right to live on? Do we have enough reverence for life to concede to wilderness this right?"

-- Margaret E. Murie

"I have always been unsatisfied with life as most people live it. Always I want to live more intensely and richly. Why muck and conceal one's true longings and loves, when by speaking of them one might find someone to understand them, and by acting on them one might discover oneself?"

-- Everett Ruess