Journeys: Snowbird Resort, Utah - Oktoberfest

Sunday, October 2, 2011

Snowbird Resort, Utah - Oktoberfest

It was another beautiful autumn weekend in Salt Lake and Hunter and Col invited me to join them for a trip up to Snowbird Ski Resort to do some hiking and enjoy some good beer at the annual Oktoberfest. Our friend Grant also decided to join us for the day.

We decided to do a moderate hike up through Peruvian Gulch and then take the tram back down to the lodge to enjoy the festival for the afternoon. The fall colors were just starting to make their appearance at the lower elevations near the resort and the views along the way were excellent.

Great colors along the trail

Flowers along the trail

Grant, the awkward giraffe, hiking up Peruvian Gulch

Aspens changing color

Red foliage

Hunter and Col

We spent some time at the top of the ridge enjoy the views into Mineral Basin, as well as looking at the snow that still remains from last winter. Then we hopped on the tram for the scenic, but slightly unnerving, ride down to the bottom of the mountain.

Hunter in Mineral Basin

Still a lot of snow leftover from last winter

Oktoberfest was OK, but not the most exciting festival I've ever been to. The beer was great, the food looked good, and I was able to score an awesome deal of some hiking shorts for next season.

Grant nomming on some German treats

Rain shower moving in after a perfect day in the mountains

Double rainbow means we had an awesome day of hiking and beer

"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