Journeys: Antelope Island State Park, Utah - Hiking

Sunday, January 12, 2014

Antelope Island State Park, Utah - Hiking

Snowshoeing is a great winter activity around Salt Lake City as popular hiking trails become suitable for snowshoeing to destinations that look completely different in winter light and snow. The popularity of snowshoeing means that the trails get packed down quickly after a winter storm, sometimes making snowshoes unnecessary for little more than the traction that they provide. Because of this, I recently purchased a pair of microspike traction devices to hook to the bottom of my hiking boots for times when traction is needed but not flotation.

Microspikes - perfect for ice and packed-snow hiking

Roger and I spent an afternoon on Antelope Island hiking to Split Rock from the White Rock Bay trail head using our microspike traction devices. There is something dramatic and beautiful about Antelope Island during the winter months. It feels like walking through a sleeping landscape, with an occasional bison or coyote breaking the icy stillness.

Driving across the causeway to Antelope Island

The Great Salt Lake

Wasatch Mountains from Antelope Island

Bison

Roger walking through the frozen landscape

"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