Gear Up Review

    The Oquirrh Mountains are always so mysterious. Riddles with trails, more than half of the mountain range is considered private property. The south end of the mountains contains something even rarer for the hills. Public Land. On the south end, lies pockets of Bureau of Land Management Public Land. This land can be accessed from the top of Butterfield canyon, various small canyons (which I am in the process of mapping/exploring) and in the back country of Ophir. For this excursion, I found a listing for the trail here on page specifying trails in the county: http://www.tooelecountytrails.com/images/print%20pdfs/lionhillloopprintablemap.pdf So, onto the trail report. It snowed. Yep. 2020, when the world is upside down and the previous Monday was hot enough my home needed to be cooled, and today, In September, it snowed. It was a beautiful respite though. The temps in Salt Lake were awful and the long period without a proper rainstorm was really grinding on me. Th...

The 10 Essentials  Before I get into the ten essentials, I want to speak to why the 10 essentials are what they are. You see, in the early days of mountaineering, mountaineering was a dangerous activity. climbing mountains, we now stroll up just one hundred years ago could be the death of you. But as the hobby matured, there came a "mountaineering" philosophy if you will. Now I don't know if the "philosophy" aspect is the correct way to refer to it, but it is how I refer to it. The philosophy is quite simple really. it is about risk mitigation. As mountaineering aged and became more and more mainstream, mountaineers began to standardize things. We have rock climbing as a discipline for example because of this, as well as hiking, skiing, camping backpacking and so on. The 10 essentials came from the background of "What equipment is essential to every mountaineering trip that I go on?" and remains to this day a standard among guides, instructors, teacher...