Jason and I had high asperations. Starting in the Albion Basin and walking the entire length of the Alpine Ridge, culminating in a summit of Lone Peak, and then walking home. All in all we were going to summit many peaks and stay two nights in the backcountry.
What really happened:
The night before, neither of us gone much sleep and what we did get wasn't very good. We also neglected to eat breakfast. It seems we were taking our sweet time in the morning, because we didn't start untill noon. We flew up sugarloaf in 45 minutes resting at cecret lake and the summit. Then we continued down the west ridge, and up mount Baldy. On that summit we were starting to feel a bit tired, but not bad. We ate some foods and were back up to full capacity. We traversed the ridge to Hidden Peak (Snowbird tram) where we spent way too much time sitting inside the warming house (or cooling house in late July). After too long a break (in which I believe I lost my pace), we headed up the class 3 north east ridge of American Fork Twin Peaks. the scrambleing was really fun and not too bad since it was working a different muscle group than the previous hike, but the exposure was mentally draining. After the class 3 section, the route goes really steep up the side of the mountain on scree. This part took a lot of effort to get up. Before too long i was on the east summit with jason a few steps behind me. We sat a minute and went to the West summit. There (as the photos can tell) we were preety dang tired. We sat a few and did the hop skip and jump to Red Top. There we sat a bit longer and thought about what we were going to do. The itinerary for the day called for us to summit Red and White baldy and camp in Red Pine. That was not going to happn. We considered droping to White Pine and camping there, but looking down at it, it didn't seem appealing. There didn't seem to be many spots to choose from, and we were preety tired. The way we are mentally, we had to finish what we were doing. Plus, I was in the mood for Taco Bell, not chicken alfredo. Most of all, my dad's digital camera had run out of batteries, thus, there was no point in continuing if we couldn't even have pictures. So we went down the west ridge of red top. at the saddle between red top and red baldy, we bailed off the ridge, going down a steep scrallus (too big to be scree, but it moves too much to be talus) slope. We took turns at a few places due to rock fall danger, and only had a few kinda close calls (in which I was on the recieving end). We reached the bottom of the slope and found ourselves on a big snowfield. No crampons to speak of, so we just slid down. At one sction there was an interesting feature. It was like an ice cliff in front of me, only about 5 feet high. Not sure how it formed as it was facing uphill. I kicksteped up it and continued down. The Slope got steeper so we improvised a rock in case we needed to self arrest. After the snowfield we were just on open meadow trying to find the trail. we had a stroke of luck and found it. We had to cross the river to get to it, but it wasn't too difficult. After that we just slogged down the trail. We called Danielle and Lars to come pick us up and they did. We got back to the trailhead at perhaps 7.
It felt like a failure, but after thought, we realised it wasn't. Sure, we hadn't doe what we had planned, but we had done good. We had summited:
Sugarloaf
Baldy
Hidden Peak (lame)
American Fork Twin Peaks (Highpoint of Salt Lake County)
Red Top
All of which (even hidden) are 11,000 foot peaks. not only that but we had done it in seven someodd hours. According to http://www.xmission.com/~wmc/hiking/hikeratings.html , the route we did (the "Bullion divide") takes 9 or so hours. All in all, good experience.
