You'd Have to be Crazy...
You'd Have to be Crazy...

You'd Have to be Crazy...

Page Type Page Type: Trip Report
Date Date Climbed/Hiked: Aug 16, 2009
Activities Activities: Scrambling
Seasons Season: Summer

Crazy Talk

Back when I was a teenager (must have been in the late 70s) on one of our family camping trips we stayed at Lily Lakes. One of the days we drove over to the Mirror Lake area to do a little fishing and sightseeing. That was the first time I saw Hayden Peak although at the time I didn't know the name of the rugged mountain. I just remember my dad saying something like "look at all those cliffs... you'd have to be crazy to climb that thing". For some reason that moment stuck with me all these years.

Hayden Peak

Time to Kill

Fast forward about 30 yrs and I'm again in the Uintas this time camping with my kids. The weather was terrible early in the trip (it snowed on 8/15/09... burrr) but cleared up that afternoon. We then went for a short hike over to Notch lake. When we got back to the truck we decided to go over to the Hayden Peak lookout for some photos. I knew my wife would want to sleep in Sunday morning so I casually mentioned that Tyler (my son) and I were thinking about climbing "that mountain" tomorrow. She said, "You two must be crazy! Just be back by noon".

We pretty much just followed the route described in the South Ridge description. The only place we strayed off was in the second cliff band on the spur ridge. We climbed the small gully on the south side of the band. Midway through this section we decided we should have just stayed on the ridge proper and ascended one of the cracks there. The rock in the gully was tall (a couple boulders were shoulder high) with very loose gravel all around making footing sketchy. All this above a pretty good drop off.

Everything else went as smooth as silk. I really enjoyed this hike. Lots of rock hopping with enough exposure to keep you honest. Dropping down the couloir on the west side is a no brainer. I think we descended from the ridge top to pine trees in under 10 min and didn't have to down climb the cliffs.

SUMMIT


Here's a link to a .kml file of the route (open in Google Earth): Hayden KML File

And a short video of the hike: Hayden Peak Hike

Images

View You'd Have to be Crazy... Image Gallery - 6 Images

Comments

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Viewing: 1-6 of 6
imontop

imontop - Aug 18, 2009 11:18 pm - Voted 10/10

Big Peak

Congrats on summiting. Everytime I look at that peak, I say the same thing your dad did! But, I guess I just need to bite the bullet and do it. Nice TR.

Tracy

Tracy - Aug 19, 2009 12:23 am - Voted 10/10

nice trip report

especially liked the video link. Did you make it back by noon as requested by the missus? :)

JonFinch

JonFinch - Aug 19, 2009 12:40 am - Hasn't voted

Re:

Thanks guys.
I'm not the fastest hiker around. I think it took us about 3 hrs to summit and 2 hrs to get down. We got back to the truck at about 12:10 pm... close enough for the girl :) We would have stayed up top longer taking in the views if it wasn't so windy.

marauders - Aug 19, 2009 3:00 pm - Voted 10/10

Good work

The view from the summit of Hayden is one of my favorite in the Uintas.

MrWasatch

MrWasatch - Aug 19, 2009 11:40 pm - Hasn't voted

Great!

Nice report and I very much enjoyed your videos, well done!

kteichert

kteichert - Sep 23, 2009 12:06 am - Hasn't voted

Great Post

Very cool to share that experience now with your own kids. I'll bet, now, you're dad is proud to call you "crazy".

Viewing: 1-6 of 6

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Parents

Parents refers to a larger category under which an object falls. For example, theAconcagua mountain page has the 'Aconcagua Group' and the 'Seven Summits' asparents and is a parent itself to many routes, photos, and Trip Reports.

Hayden PeakTrip Reports