It started out looking promising, but… The trail disappeared. I was hiking with my brother, and fortunately he didn’t mind bushwhacking. We enjoyed the hike; the falcon we saw was magnificent, and the glacier remains where pretty interesting.
How did we end up thinking we where going to be hiking a mountain, and end up bushwhacking to nowhere? Well my family was out camping, and I was going to bike up, and meet them the following morning, but due to some rain, I quickly tried to find a nearby hike to replace the bike ride I had originally planned. A search on the internet pulled up a nearby mountain called buffalo mountain. I met my family, and my brother decided to go on the hike with me. We found the right parking lot, but we were supposed to walk a little ways up the road to the trailhead, instead, we started following what looked liked a trail at first, and then disappeared into nothing. Bushwhacking after a rainstorm, is not the smartest idea, we had to navigate through wet grass, but it soon dried up as the sun came out.
The hike itself took us through some beautiful meadows. We took a little detour on the way back to a random pile of rocks on the mountainside. We ended up recognizing this to normally be a glacier. There where rocks that the snow had carved out, and others that where smoother than normal. The crowning part of the hike was a falcon that came within 40 feet of us. He flew back around to us a few times, before flying off into the distance.
Pros
- Nice view of squaw peak and buffalo mountain(the peak I’d planned on hiking)
- Plenty of shade
- You’re hiking through meadows of flowers
- There’s a cool glacier to visit
Cons
- You have to bushwhack the entire time
- There was no real destination, we just hiked up cascade mountain
Max elevation: 8698 ft
Total time: 03:05:14
Walking through the meadows
On the way back we took a detour to this glacier
This falcon kept swooping super close to us. It was awesome
We had a nice view of Utah Lake