Hike to the top of Timp 2010

So ever since I moved to Utah I always wanted to hike to the Top of Timp. Supposedly it's the second highest mountain in Utah, but in the summer you can hike to the top. So The day before Dennis and I were flying home to Washington to see our families, we drove to Sundance and just past it is the trail head. At 2 am we began our hike.  We were well prepared with 5 hour energy drinks, PB and J sandwiches, water, and flashlights. It's about a 7 mile hike up, so we were hoping to get to the top in time to watch the sunrise. The hike started out great, in fact, thanks to the five hour energy drinks we even passed a couple of other hikers! We were making good time! But the problem was there were other trails off of the main trail, and since neither of us had hiked it before we sometimes took the wrong path - and the dark made it hard to tell where you were supposed to go at times. The first three hours were great, a lot of uphill, but it was ok. But about three hours into our hike we both crashed. I remember just sitting on a rock, not wanting to keep going. But we kept going. Once we got up the the lake, we had about another mile to go. And that last mile was super sucky. Basically we were now above the tree line and just hiking on rocks. I just kept thinking no wonder they call them the Rocky Mountains! When you are surrounded by rocks it's hard to tell where the path is, luckily it was starting to get light by that point which helped. As we neared the top we saw some other hikers merging from another trail ahead which made it a lot easier to tell where to go. Eventually we made it to the top, 30 seconds before the sunrise! All we had was my phone to take pictures, but the hikers ahead of us were really nice and shared their pictures with us, so here are a few of them:

Sunrise

View from the top - honestly I think its better from the Y.

We were exhausted - and maybe that's partially due to such a high altitude since we were over 10,000 feet above sea level.

That little building is where you can stay when you get to the top. There really isn't much room up there, and I can't imagine how crazy it would be if it was crowded!

The top was far from what I imagined. For some reason I thought there would be more room to walk around, and maybe even trees up there - definitely not the case!

The way down was really pretty! (once we got past all the rocks) There were so many flowers!

These next few were taken with my camera so the quality isn't as good.

There were a lot of water falls the way we came!

Still some snow

I think we finished the hike around 11 am and it was already getting hot! It was crazy to see some people starting that time of day! So for us Washingtonians, the view from the top was pretty disappointing. Not really exciting at all. BUT - in the light, the hike up to the the lake is really pretty, so for now on when I hike Timp I won't go past the lake. But now we can say we summited Mount Timpanogos!