| Wasatch National Forest, UT |

The mountains surrounding Salt Lake City are imposing.

Standing sentinel over the city below they provide an impressive and intimidating backdrop.

During my time in town, the peaks of those mountains have been shrouded in mystery as they are enveloped in a constant shroud of clouds.

Clouds of course are often laden with precipitation and the type of precipitation falling from those clouds depends on their altitude.

Well yesterday I experienced a meteorological cornucopia of precipitation as I hiked in the Twin Peaks Wilderness, on the Broads Fork Trail.

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I’d researched some trails the night before and in part because of a wonderfully genial waitress at Ice Haus, who’s name I have embarrassingly forgotten, had picked out Bells Canyon and Broads Fork.

Note: Ice Haus is a rather unusual German / Vegan / Vegetarian / Brewery foodie paradise and one of the cooler restaurants I’ve visited on this trip.

The weather forecast looked pretty lousy for not just the next day, but really the whole week, so I was going to be hiking in some slop no matter what.

The only questions would be what type of slop and how significant would it be.

Well it turned out that it was going to be significant as I woke up to pouring rain and a daily forecast that offered only a glimmer of a break in the middle of the day.

Ultimately it didn’t really matter what the weather app said, as I didn’t come on this trip to hide from the weather – and since I’m not the Wicked Witch, I wasn’t going to melt in the rain anyways.

So off I went into the Wasatch.

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The drive into the canyons was glorious as the always are. The highway twisted and turned as the mountains and their cloud ringed glory looked down upon me.

I reached the trail head and I hung out for a bit in the hopes that the rain would slow down / stop, and to my pleasant surprise, it did.

As a matter of fact, the beginnings of the trail were all but void of rain, save for the raindrops that kept fallin’ on my head, from the trees above.

But the huge benefit of that rain is the ambrosia of smells in the forest.

Probably my favorite scent in this world is the scent of the forest after a recent rain, and if there were a fragrance to cure all your ills, this would be the one that would do it for me.

Throw in the benefit of the fact that this specific forest had plenty of pine trees leaching their scents and the aforementioned visuals and heaven on earth is probably a pretty apt description.

As I climbed and as I fully expected the rain returned.

The rain then turned to sleet.

The sleet then turned to snow.

But save for my hands, and mainly thanks to the modern technical clothing available, I was really pretty comfortable.

According to what I’d read in the AllTrails reviews, this specific trail was likely to get much more challenging as I hit about the midpoint where a bridge crossed a ‘stream’.

Well, at this time of year, there aren’t many streams in these mountains and I had already gotten a sneak preview of this one at the trailhead and accompanying the road on the way up.

This stream had been bolstered many times over by rain and snowmelt and it was thus, very, very angry.

It released some of that anger in the form of a roar that broke through the silence of the forest, and grew ever louder as I grew ever closer.

Ultimately unveiling itself in a visual cataclysm as it overflowed it’s banks and lapped at the base of a bridge that served as my portal to the second half of this trek.

As foretold in the reviews, the snowpack gained in depth pretty substantially past that bridge, mainly because the grade of the trail, climbing 2200 feet over the course of about 2.5 miles was significant.

So what was a dusting of snow on the ground, became a few inches, which became a few inches more, which became a few more, until there were some decisions to be made by me.

For those inches were now feet and quite tiring to plow through.

In addition to that, I had absolutely no clue where the trail was.

There were certainly no footprints to follow and as I often am, I was flying solo on this hike.

So I’d plow ahead for 30-50 yards or so, pull out the map, often see I wasn’t on point, have to get myself back in course, and then repeat the whole cycle a few minutes later.

Were there just a couple of inches of snow, the trail wouldn’t matter all that much. After all as long as you were generally close to it and going up, then you’d get to the final destination at some point.

Problem was mainly that I had no idea what was underneath that snow.

I didn’t have any microspikes or snowshoes, so I kept breaking through the hardpack, which by now was measured in (multiple) feet.

Usually I’d break through to ankle depth, sometimes to the knee and a couple times, in a little frightful moment, up to the hip.

So you don’t know what you’re walking on top of and certainly don’t want to fall into a hole of some sort.

At some point I was getting worn out and questioning the wisdom of moving forward.

I’d added a bunch of distance to the hike by wandering off path and while normally I could do three miles in my sleep, three miles in this snow was proving much more challenging. Especially after trekking through the sand dunes of Little Sahara the day before.

With about three tenths of a mile to go, I was just about to throw in the towel. I wasn’t happy about it, but I had just about had it when for the first time all day, the sun poked it’s head through the clouds.

The sun is a wonderful motivator and in this time and place it was almost as if Mother Nature herself were encouraging me to finish what I started.

So slightly recharged, I obeyed and trudged on.

I closed about half the remaining distance, passed through a grove of pines and then literally laughed out loud at the absurdity of the snow pile, and grade in front of me.

We’d definitely saved the ‘best’ for last as I was staring at what must have been at least a 60 degree angle.

So I literally was kicking my toes into the snow to gain a foothold with which to propel forward. And often slipping and falling in the wet snow to boot.

I took a break, left my pack in the care of a big rock to lighten the load, said ‘screw it’ and climbed the final two hills to the finish line.

And man am I glad that I did.

For as I reached the top of the final hill, I stared down into a wondrous winter cul-de-sac of mountainous glory.

Mother Nature, as she often does, outdid herself yet again – and the reward for my persistency was my own mini-version of the Alps or Pyrenees.

I hung out for a couple minutes snapping pictures while being very careful about where I walked; because according to the reviews there was a lake somewhere under all that snow.

Falling though the snow and into a lake would have been very, very bad, and potentially deadly.

Then suddenly, and completely antithetical to her prior graciousness, Mother Nature became far less so as the snow returned. In force.

Almost as if she was now saying ‘You’ve had your fun, now get the hell out of here.‘

Deferential to the one truly in charge out here, I obeyed.