Backpacker Magazine – May 2011

The High Life: Hiking Utah's Highline Trail

Watch your step on Utah' Highline Trail. The nonstop views and rampant wildlife are distractingly spectacular. Plus: Gaze away on 9 more elevated hikes.

by: Steve Howe

Tags:
• Destinations
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• Utah
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• Highline Trail
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• High Uintas Wilderness
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• Maine
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• New Hampshire
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• Appalachian Trail
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• Mahoosuc Range
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• Arizona
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• Lost Dutchman State Park
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• Pacific Crest Trail
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• Goat Rocks Wilderness
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• Washington
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• Alberta
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• Canada
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• Franklin Mountains State Park
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• Texas
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• Inyo National Forest
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• California
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• George Washington National Forest
|
• Virginia
|
• Montana
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• Gallatin National Forest
|
• Continental Divide Trail
|
• Weminuche Wilderness
|
• Colorado
|

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“I love wildlife, but this is getting ridiculous,” Pete laughs, after a coyote wail scares the bull moose we’ve been watching just outside of camp. He has a point. We’d only hiked a half mile from the trailhead near Hacking Lake on a warm August day when we stopped to ogle a herd of 35 mountain goats. Minutes later, a weasel darted upon our track with a mouse hanging in its mouth. Another half mile, and Pete stumbled two spotted elk calves lounging near timberline. Then, two more goat herds on the five-mile climb to 11,700-foot Gabbro Pass, from which we flush 100 elk on the far side. After just 10 miles of hiking, we’ve had about one animal encounter per mile. And that’s just counting the obvious ones. We surely missed more, with 100-mile vistas hogging our attention nearly every step of the way.

Views of every kind—distant horizons, nearby wildlife, isolated lake basins—are better on ridgeline hikes. And the king of the hill is the Highline Trail, which runs 78 east-west miles through the 456,705-acre High Uintas Wilderness of northeast Utah. The often-bouldery track crosses nine major passes and seldom dips below 10,500 feet. It’s the perfect aerie to spy the wilderness’s 26 summits above 13,000 feet, an estimated 1,000 lakes and ponds, 36 major streams, and megafauna galore. My partner, Pete Rives, an Appalachian Trail thru-hiker from North Carolina, brought a fly rod, and I’ve packed my camera, the tools of our stop-and-play hobbies. This is not a recipe for ticking off miles, but with these surroundings, we’d be fools to rush it.

You’d think all of this unobstructed beauty would attract a crowd, but fewer than 50 people a year thru-hike the ridge-hugging track—it’s overshadowed on a regional menu that includes the Tetons, Sawtooths, Wind Rivers, and Colorado’s Fourteeners. The Uintas’ long, brick-red ridgelines of billion-year-old quartzite, gradually being swallowed by their own talus, have a powerful majesty that 19th-century explorer Ferdinand Hayden singled out among all the mountain ranges he’d seen. Compared to others, he wrote, the Uintas stands alone for its “contrast so pleasing to the eye.”

Of course, treeless alpine grandeur doesn’t come without some risk. The next night, we camp at Fox Lake in a bowl not far below 12,710-foot Anderson Pass, at mile 33, the trail’s highest point. Clouds appear and gusts swirl. We get ready to run for it, but fortunately no lightning appears.

We drop packs atop Anderson Pass the next morning to side hike to Kings Peak, Utah’s 13,528-foot highpoint. There’s no summit register, just another world’s-end vista of lake-dotted tundra, spiked pine forests, and mazes of snow-banked ridgeline. On lesser treks, this would be the highlight moment. Here, such views are routine.



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