As I readied my pack for the hike to Utah’s Mount Timpanogos, I cringed to hear the distant sound of kids and counselors from Aspen Grove Camp launch into what seemed like their twentieth chorus of “Here Comes the Sun.” If I didn’t leave this trailhead soon, that song was going to be stuck in my head all day. I had to resist the urge to shout back, “Look, the sun came already! Do we need to summon the ghost of George Harrison to confirm this observation?” Bah. Mormons are too cheery to be allowed to go out in public.
At least the homebrewed legend of Timpanogos had a respectable element of tragedy to it. In ages past, the Timpanogots Ute tribe was suffering from an unrelenting drought, and the Princess Utahna was chosen as a human sacrifice to appease their angry god. She left her village, climbed the highest peak and was prepared to throw herself off, but a young brave from a neighboring tribe named Red Eagle spied her and begged her not to jump. Utahna thought Red Eagle was the Great God of Timpanogos, and the brave hesitated to enlighten her, because he had fallen in love, and to speak the truth would mean her death. If he returned with Utahna to his village, his deception would likewise be revealed, and she would carry out her sacrifice.
To save the princess, Red Eagle led her to a crystalline cave, far from her village, and made her his wife. For many moons they lived together in happiness, until a bear wandered into the cave, and Red Eagle was injured driving it off. Utahna saw the blood and finally realized that her husband was not a god. She cared for him until his wounds healed, then slipped away. Red Eagle found his wife’s broken body at the base of a cliff beneath Mount Timpanogos. He carried her back to the cave, laid her down beside a still pool of water, and died mourning for his lost princess. The Great God of Timpanogos then took their hearts, merged them into one, and fastened it to the ceiling of their burial chamber, where the heart-shaped stalactite can still be seen by visitors of Timpanogos Cave National Monument.
It’s a touching story. And interestingly, the tale was merely an invention of Brigham Young University professor Eugene Roberts, told around a bonfire in 1922 the night before an annual pilgrimage to the summit called the “Timp Hike.” This version was quickly accepted as a genuine Indian legend and continues to be shared with visitors on cave tours.
Although the Timp Hike was permanently cancelled in 1970 due to the ravaging effects of thousands of people hitting the trail at the same time, the summit of Mount Timpanogos remains one of the most-visited in the Rocky Mountains. I scarcely saw anyone the first few hours of my journey, perhaps because the other hikers had started much earlier in the morning. Or possibly the campers’ singing had scared them away. A flat tire had delayed my own departure, but now I was grateful to have the trail to myself. The path zig-zagged up the mountain through stands of dwarfish Gambel oaks and past gentle waterfalls. Much of this section followed a two-foot wide strip of crumbling pavement - a relic from some previous attempt to forestall the damage caused by the hordes of Timp Hikers. The asphalt had fallen down the mountainside in several spots, giving the trail a more deserted atmosphere than it probably warranted.
On the edge of treeline, the palette of the landscape shifted from green to gold, courtesy of the strands of yarrow that were withering on the hillsides. The end of summer had arrived, and the colorful indian paintbrushes were almost out of paint. Further along, violet bursts of lupines helped to offset the amber color spectrum and spur me towards the shores of Emerald Lake, where the monstrous east face of Mount Timpanogos stopped me in my tracks.
The mountain rose above the surrounding land like a striped leviathan emerging from the depths of the ocean. It was covered in grey and yellow streaks as if great wounds had been gouged across its flanks when it tore its way through the earth’s crust. Atop the head of the whale perched the tiny ruins of a metal observation tower, as well as several specks that might have signified triumphant hikers. Utahna must have had some serious stamina if she managed to walk all the way up there.
I encountered the rest of my fellow climbers when I snuck around the backside of Timpanogos and hiked the easier path to the summit. It was surprising how many people thought that hiking a vertical mile was a good thing to do on a Monday morning. But we were rewarded when the cities of Salt Lake and Provo finally lay seven thousand feet below us, along with the souls of about two million people.
One woman told me she’d been to the top on seventeen occasions, but this was the first time she would return the way she came, rather than taking the faster route down the Timpanogos Glacier to Emerald Lake. Seven years of drought in Utah had sapped the glacier of its strength, leaving only a few snowfields scattered among the rubble. Despite the fact that none of the dozens of other hikers seemed interested in attempting this shortcut, I decided to give it a try.
Fortunately, over the last two decades I had trained my body to slide down rubble almost as easily as snow. I pieced together a route through the snowfield remnants down to Emerald Lake, and wondered how the glacier must have looked in its former glory. The glacial ice that existed on the surface before the Dust Bowl Drought had long-since vanished, though allegedly a portion continued to exist underneath my feet below tons of talus, like a buried legend. Somewhere beneath all those boulders, a tiny glacier possibly crept, grinding rock against rock and producing the fine silt that trickled out into Emerald Lake, giving the water the bluish-green hue it was famous for.
In another version of the native folktale, Red Eagle was ambushed on Mount Timpanogos by jealous warriors and fell to his death, becoming immortalized as Emerald Lake. Uthana was so despondent that she collapsed atop the mountain and died, which is why the distant profile of Timpanogos resembled a lying woman. I appreciated these stories and how they attempted to explain natural processes. The geologic origins of caves, mountains and lakes may have been thoroughly delineated by science, but at least some things out here, like the hypothetical glacier, are hidden from the human eye and are still halfway bound to the realms of myth and mystery.