There and Back Again, by Bilbo Baggins

We went on a hike. To the top of Mt. Timpanogos. Over night. With giant backpacks carrying sleeping bags, tents, lots of water, pjs, and food.

I have never done anything more extreme in my entire life. Nor has anything made me feel more miserable, exhausted, and without hope. Nor has anything ever made me feel so accomplished, proud, and happy to have tried really really hard.

Sidenote: hiking Mt. Timp is a tradition for BYU students. In the earlier days of BYU, massive student groups led by Eugene Roberts (practically the founder of BYU athletics) would hike the mountain every year. So, it was something that I really wanted to do before graduating from BYU. It is something you've gotta do as a student. With other students.

This is how it went down:

The crew: Me, Dani, Michael (D's BF), Seth, Bryce, Isaac, and this other girl that I had just met, Rachel (a different Rachel from the HP party post)

We were supposed to leave at 9:00PM. We didn't. We didn't get to the trailhead and started hiking until 11:00PM.

The group, before we started hiking. We all look a little scary. The camera was on a timer, and some of us weren't prepared... But we look happy. For now.

We hiked for a while. Suddenly things started to look familiar. Come to find out, the first part of our hike was a circle. We sent scouts back to the beginning to look at the map. Isaac drew the map on his arm. We all said it was like the map of the London Underground shaped scar on Dumbledore's leg.

It was at this point that I realized I had made a crucial mistake: We were hiking in the middle of the night, and no one in the group had ever made the 6.5-ish mile hike before. At this point, I was extremely close to saying, "so, let's go home. It's already too late." But I didn't say it because I didn't want to be a party pooper.

We started hiking again. We came to switchbacks. Instead of going back and forth on the switchback trail, we often just climbed straight up from one part of the trail to another. It was hard. And rocky and slippery.

Sometimes the path was wet. And I swear we crossed a stream/river like eight times. My feet were wet. I started to get blisters on the bottom of my feet.

The batteries in my flashlight went out. I found a new one.

I swear I was the only person that ever asked if we could take a break. That got old. Really fast.

We hiked for three hours. Up the side of an entire mountain. In the pitch black. Carrying all of our camping gear. The only thing we knew about our stopping point was that there was going to be a meadow and that there was going to be a lake. It's kind of hard to see those things in the dark.

We found what we thought was a meadow, but we kept walking. And then we found the lake. And THEN, miracle of miracles, Seth found a one-room, stone COTTAGE! A little cottage in the middle of the meadow. We quickly huddled inside. It was around 2:30AM at this point. I was tired. While us girls prepared to go to bed and sat around a lot, the boys set up two tents in the cottage (one for boys and one for girls), found fire wood (there was a fire place in the cottage), and were somehow (it took a lot of time and effort) able to drag a giant piece of scrap metal that they found on the side of the house to cover most of the opening left by the missing front door to the cottage. That giant piece of metal was a LIFE SAVER. I am being completely honest when I say that I have NEVER experienced such wind as we did that night and the next morning. We needed that door. It made the cottage quieter, calmer, WARMER, and a lot less of everything blowing around all over the place. 

By the time we got everything set up, it was 3:30AM. We realized that in order to make it up to the peak of the mountain by sunrise we needed to get up and leave at 4:30AM. We. slept. for. one. hour. Oh wait, did I say slept? I meant closed our eyes. Well, I might have slept for a couple minutes. But dang, you try sleeping on cement floor (where are your hips and butt supposed to go?) with mad wind crashing against your cottage and blowing your door around. BUT, I was warm, and conditions were significantly better where we were than they would have been anywhere else.

When the alarm went off we all grumbled, but got out of our warm sleeping bags and prepared for the final ascent. We left our gear in the cottage, thank goodness. I wanted to prolong putting my backpack on again as long as possible (that thing left bruises on my shoulders).

Notice: forlorn, exhausted, without hope looks on their faces.

This last hour was by far the hardest part. No sleep+hours of hiking doesn't mix super well. I struggled. I lagged behind. And I was very haggard. And it was cold (there was even lots of snow) To get an idea of how I looked and felt, Picture Frodo and Sam climbing the mountains into Mordor. Picture "the black stair" that they climb where Frodo abandons Sam and then gets stabbed by Shelob, the giant spider. Think of Sam stubbling around and kind of crying. He looks so sad and lost and scared, and it makes you cry too. That was me. (Okay, not really that bad. But it's funny, right?)

Frodo and Sam, very miserable, looking into the the distance and realizing they still have SO FAR to go. (PS, looking up these pictures really made me want to watch LOTR. Dani. Let's have a marathon.)

I was the last one in our group to make it to the top, but WOAH. The view was breathtaking. It was incredible. In both directions. I looked out and could not believe how far I had come. As we sat at the top together, marveling in the world that we live in, I couldn't help but think back on the moments on the trail when I really, really, really wanted to give up. I had told myself that I didn't really care about making it to the top. That it really wasn't a big deal, and that I didn't have to do it. I even told myself that if I got injured I could get a ride home on a helicopter, and that would even make a cool story. But you know what? I'm not a quitter, and I knew that even as those thoughts were flying through my head for the first time, that they weren't real. There was never a moment when I wasn't going to finish, I can just be really dramatic sometimes. But for real. It was hard. I really wanted to stop. to rest.

Okay, so this is a video of me actually making it to the top. Isaac was filming, and unfortunately, he only got half of the view on tape. And also, the video is not that exciting, but you can get a little bit of an idea of how high we were. In was insane. And you can see the little shelter at the top. 

But I finished, and I am so glad that I did. We watched the sun rise, and it was a miracle. The sun rises every day. But how many times do we notice? I pray for sunshine all the time. I love it so much. I never want a rainy day. But I don't know how many times in my life I have actually seen the sun rise, and have been able to enjoy that. Well, I enjoyed it that day. I enjoyed it from the tip top of a mountain. The second-highest mountain peak in the Wasatch Range of the Rocky Mountains.

So, we were at the top. But there were some others at the top. Some other students, similar to us, and then there was this man. I swear he was a mountain man. He looked normal, but he was unusual. I could tell. First of all, he was by himself. Second, he told us it was his 20th time hiking the mountain. Third, he slept in the little hut at the top of the mountain. That might be the number 1 worst place to sleep on this Earth. Fourth, to get down the mountain, he slid down the glacier.  I am not making this up. Fifth, he took a swim in the lake at the bottom of the glacier- the one by our cottage. That lake was being fed by the glacier. Those things are frozen! The water was literally just barely above freezing temperatures. See? Mountain Man. Sixth, he paid Isaac $20 to swim in the glacier too. He did it. I think that mountain man picked Isaac as his heir.

I also want to add that out of the 7 of us, I was somehow the only person to bring a camera. And it died. Like right after the movie featured above was filmed. So we used Isaac's phone to take a picture of us at the top. I don't have that picture. Someday I will get it, and post it up here. But the video is proof that we actually made it! 

After basking in the recently-risen sun for a while and deciding we could brave the wind again, we hiked back down. We got back to the cottage, and after eating some little breakfast, we all went back to sleep. There was nothing else for it. We were exhausted. And we actually slept this time. At least I did. And I slept well. It was very refreshing. We napped for probably an hour, maybe more, and then cleaned everything up to go home. My favorite part of the trip, I think, was that nap. It was really fun when Dani and I were awake, but the boys thought we were still asleep, and they were really funny. Dumb boys. They didn't know girls were listening. And we just lied there quietly. Giggling a lot.

The mountain goats by the cottage. See the pretty lake? And wildflowers?

The cottage. It kind of isn't a cottage. Oh well. We were trying to look triumphant. (notice the snow in the background. That is part of the glacier. It was slippery).

The hike back down was unbelievable. It was amazing to see everything that we had previously hiked through in the dark. I had NO IDEA what we had come through. It was beautiful. More beautiful (and heavenly) than I could possibly describe. I tried to take pictures, but none of them do it justice. It was amazing. The farther down we got, the more amazed I was at what we had accomplished. I am being honest when I say that if I would have known exactly where we were going from the beginning, there is a VERY high chance that I never would have tried. Sometimes ignorance is a very good thing.

Picture taken a little more than halfway back down. You can't even see the peak from here... you have to go over this mountain, through a meadow, and then up to another peak, which is about an hour's worth of hiking HIGHER than this one in the picture. But so beautiful, right?

One of the many waterfalls we played in on the way back down. Please don't look at these pictures closely. While Dani may look adorable, I, on the other hand, do not.

I think, though, that the hike down felt longer than the hike up. It was significantly easier to go down (but really hard on the knees), but it felt like it took forever. And I fell a couple of times. One of my falls resulted in scrapes and cuts all down my right leg. Oh, and little rocks and dirt inside of the cuts. We had to squirt out the rocks with a water bottle and bandage me up. It hurt. And now the tan on my leg is going to be all messed up. And I might have scars. Eek.

But I made it. We all did. I hiked Mount Timpanogos. I think it was about 13 miles total, there and back again.

At the bottom of the trail. We look a little worn out. (Well, Michael and Dani look like Christmas morning) And I am posing very awkwardly.

Our trip lasted for about 15 hours. It felt like 3 days.

The end.