King's Peak

King's Peak

County: Duchesne
Peak elevation: 13,528'
One way hiking distance: 12.2 miles
Elevation gain: 5252'
Date hiked: Aug 18, 2005 - Aug 20, 2005

King's Peak is the highest point in Utah, and it was the first county highpoint I hiked. I think I'd also have to say that so far it has been my favorite peak to climb. The whole backpacking trip through that area was a blast. I love backpacking in the Uintas. The hike wasn't easy, but it was worth it.

Day 1: Eric, my brother, his friend David Andreson and another one of his friends named Reid I think, piled into Reid's truck and drove to the Henry's fork trailhead. From there we hiked in about 7 miles to Dollar Lake where we made base camp. We got to the lake by about 4:00 probably and just hung out for the rest of the evening. For dinner I had a steak tin foil dinner that I cooked on the fire. It got kind of overcooked so it was kind of dry. While I was eating it for some reason I was all alone. I guess everyone had gone down to the lake or something. Anyways, the food started getting stuck in my thought and I thought I was going to die. My water had ran
out and I was too far from the lake to go filter more. This wasn't the first time this had happened to me, but it was pretty bad and it hurt terribly. Well, after rolling around on the ground for a while it finally went down, but I learned to never eat dry tin foil dinners without plenty of water on hand. By the way, this food stuck in through episode was pretty bad but it was nothing compared to what happened to me in Moab during Easter Jeep Safari 2007. Thats another story though.



Day 2: We got up around 7:00 AM and started hiking. From Dollar Lake we hiked up to Gunsight Pass and from there we left the main trail and went directly to Anderson Pass. The main trail goes way around. With the short cut we had to do some minor scrambling and boulder hopping, but it wasn't too bad, and was worth the time we saved. The pic below is us doing that minor scrambling. Look at all the people! There was like some sort of young women's group and
a boy scout group that got in front of us while Eric had to sit down cause he thought he was going to throw up. What happened was we crossed this snow field cause we thought we would save time, but it ended up being really hard and it took a long time and kept pushing Eric to go faster and faster until he sat down and almost threw up. It was funny. Funny and sad. But mostly funny. The next pic is me on top of Anderson Pass. From Anderson Pass you hike up to the top. That was the hardest part. Going from like 12,000 feet up to the 13,528' peak was tough on the lungs. I got a pretty good altitude head ache. Eric basically ran up. I don't know how he does it.
Anyways, once on top there weren't that many people. I don't know what happened to all those other people who passed us cause we didn't see them up there. It was cool to stand on the peak and be the tallest person in Utah. So after eating lunch up there we headed down.

When we got to Anderson Pass we decided to head down the rock slide. In hind sight it was probably a bad idea, but it saved a lot of time. There were some other people coming down the chute that we stayed away from cause they were kicking up a lot of big boulders that would have killed us if we'd have been below them. Once we got back to camp we all just crashed and slept for the rest of the afternoon. It was a pretty tiring day.

Day 3: Got up around 9:00 AM and hiked out. I think there was only about a 1000' elev gain over the 7 miles out, but it took FOREVER!!! It felt like we would never get back to the truck. But eventually we did and the McDonalds in Evenston was delicious.

Interesting note: The picture below of Kings Peak was chosen by www.summitpost.org as the cover photo for their King's Peak page.