Lost on Death Mountain!

 

It started out innocently enough. Sam had a meeting at BYU and then a free day, and I had a free day…(if I neglected all the other things I should have been doing)…and Clementine had a free day, so we decided to leave everyone else at home and drive through Provo Canyon, up and over Guardsman Pass, and back home via Big Cottonwood Canyon.

We've done the Guardsman Pass drive lots of times, so we know it well. We know just where it comes out in Midway and just what golf course it passes by and just the way it curves up toward the summit. There is no possible way to miss it.

Right?

Shortly after you pass that golf course in Midway, the road turns up the mountain. Then it becomes a dirt road, but a pretty good dirt road…at least we've always been fine on it before.

It was QUITE bumpy this year. But then, we've had lots of rain lately. And the winters are always hard on roads. And there were lots of ATV's driving on the road who had probably ruined it too. Anyway, it was SO pretty!

Some maples down lower. Blue skies. Yellow aspens. Green pines.

As we got up higher, the leaves seemed to get prettier and prettier…and just…more all-encompassing. Like the the wilderness had started taking over when no one else was around. And no one else WAS around! We were so lucky to have the road all to ourselves. Unusual for a warm Fall day!

I loved these huge aspen forests, of course—you know aspens are my favorite color of yellow—but even the ones where the leaves were half-fallen were so beautiful.

Those slender, silvery trunks all lined up neatly like the teeth of a comb. Or the spines of a hedgehog.

I kept thinking how I had never really seen these places before. Oh, I had seen them—I kept thinking each turn was almost familiar, and yes, certainly I remembered this part, and soon no doubt we would see that other part I definitely remembered—but I had never SEEN them so truly as I was seeing them now. Just like Henry David Thoreau, who was SO much more "awake" than the dull masses around him. That's how I was compared to my past self, and compared to basically anyone. 

We knew we must be almost to the summit, because the road kept climbing and climbing and climbing. Clementine was sleeping through it all—she liked the bumpiness of the road, apparently—and we were saving our lunch to eat at the top.

It was taking us forever, though, on this bumpy road, which really had deteriorated so much since we were last here. Blasted ATV's.

It was the most lovely partly-cloudy day. We drove through sunshine and then shadow and then sun again, and the darker clouds almost looked like dark blue sky through the yellow trees. It looked like it might rain, later. Though we'd probably be home by then.

We loved how wild it all seemed this time. We hadn't noticed that wildness the other times we made this drive. But you could walk out off the road just a few steps, under the trees, and suddenly feel like you were in the middle of nowhere!

We did stop the car several times so we could get out and look around. I loved this area with the yellowing ferns carpeting the ground underneath the yellow ceiling of trees. I never knew a Utah forest could have ferns!

And then somehow two hours had passed. And the road started to go down again, through some pine forests neither Sam nor I remembered. Down some very rocky inclines. Down some even rockier inclines. Down some inclines where the ATV drivers passing us from time to time seemed to have a sort of look on their faces that said, "Hmm. Aren't YOU adventurous." 

And we started to have that sinking feeling that something was wrong. But our phone maps didn't work. And there were no signs. And we were both trying very hard to be cheerful but I, for one, thought I might start crying. And then Clementine DID start crying, and we stopped the car and said a prayer.

We didn't ever feel completely panicked, luckily. The car GPS was still working, though the map was strange, but by scrolling around for awhile we could see that we were NOT on the Guardsman Pass road. But how could that be?? We'd recognized our surroundings! And there was no other road! There had been no other turn-offs! Or if there were, how had both of us missed them?

We tried to decide what to do. We did NOT want to go back up those steep, bumpy roads. They'd been bad enough the first time. On the other hand…we didn't KNOW what the roads ahead would be like. If there were roads at all.

Finally we decided we should go back. ALL the way back. We could see from the map that there hadn't been any turns, which meant we had been on the wrong road all along. Surely there is a Sunday School lesson in there somewhere!

So we headed back. (Don't let this picture fool you. This is a GOOD bit of road near the top. Not the scary road up and down.) And here were the good things:

• We had Clementine with us, not waiting at home. So we could feed her and it didn't matter too much if we took hours getting home.

• We were not out of gas. Yet. And there were ATV's coming by every now and then so we weren't all alone.

• Our car was handling it all okay, with Sam driving. I was SO glad Sam was driving.

• It was really, really beautiful.

• We still had lunch to eat.

• It hadn't started raining.

• The way back went a little faster because we weren't expecting to see something different around every turn.

This is really the best kind of adventure to have. It was a little scary for a few minutes. But we were together, and we didn't have all the children there getting restless. We knew we'd be okay in the end, and we were mostly just annoyed to have been so completely wrong about where we were!

But the drive back was lovely. And now that we knew we were on the wrong road, we kept saying, "You know, I thought something was weird when we saw this…" and "It's funny, I felt like something was off when we didn't see that…"

When we got home we looked at the map to figure out where we'd been and it was…way off. Like really off. What on earth?? Who would have thought that golf course would have two mountain roads that went right past it…one on each side. Which looked remarkably similar at the beginning. Just "a matter of a few degrees…"

We stopped and ate our lunch looking out at this amazing view, and the rain started to fall, but it was cozy in the car, and not so much of a downpour that it made the road worse.

When we got back down we debated whether or not to go back up the Guardsman Pass way. Or just head home through the boring way through Park City. We decided we might as well have the comparison while our memories were fresh! So back up we went.

Guardsman Path was beautifully paved (newly paved, I think) and smooth and went like a flash. We were up and over in about 15 minutes. There were people and cars everywhere. So…from the comfortable perch of hindsight…I'm glad we got lost. And I'd do it again (though maybe not go quite so far…and certainly not by myself). It was definitely a beautiful, memorable, day!