Hiking in Spring Hollow

Martin Luther King Day offered and excellent chance to enjoy some of the great outdoors. What made things even better was the fact that it had just snowed quite a bit in the mountains the weekend before. I woke up and left Heather to enjoy breakfast with her sisters-in-law as I rode with Erik, Bruce and Berkley up to Spring Hollow on the South Fork of the Provo River.

We arrived at the trailhead and put all of our gear on. There was only one other car there, which was probably due to the rather cold temperatures, somewhere in the mid-teens. We finally started up the drainage around 8am.

The temperature remained cold, but we had a blast! We got the see the run rise on back of Cascade Mountain and then as the shadows gradually fled from the narrow valley we were hiking through. We followed snowmobile tracks for a while, and then the tracks of a lone snowboarder. Finally, we broke just a little trail of our own and stopped and simply enjoyed the beautiful scenery on a cold morning in the mountains. We had hiked around 4 miles and gained over 2,000 feet of elevation.

When we finally started to get cold again, we turned around and hiked out. We saw several groups of people closer to the trailhead, and we were grateful that we got our early to enjoy the solidarity and quietness of the mountains. We made it down to the trailhead, stowed our gear and took off. As we drove out of the canyon, we saw storms brewing on Cascade, and we were glad that we had turned around when we did. All-in-all, a great way to get out for a few hours on a wonderful winter day.