So a couple of years ago my friend Meghan and I did an epic run. The route was on the road around Pineview Reservoir, then up Wheeler Canyon trail to Snowbasin Ski Area. Then up the ski area to the top of Mt. Ogden. From there we caught the Beus Canyon trail down to the trail head in South Ogden. A total of around 30 miles. We had an absolute blast that day and decided to reprise the run today. Alas, the outcome was a little different but we still had a great time.
This morning we met at the Beus Canyon trailhead, left my car there and drove up to the Wheeler Canyon trailhead. The weather forecast was a little iffy, but we were hoping that maybe we could beat out the weather with an early start.

Meghan ready to go


Our goal, over the top (hopefully)

We got started on the road portion around 6:30am. Traffic was fairly light and we finished that portion in a little over 2 hours. As you can see, the day started out fairly nice weatherwise. We kept our fingers crossed hoping it would stay that way.

Looking up Wheeler Canyon

So we got started up Wheeler Canyon around 9am. Wheeler Canyon is a fairly popular canyon for hikers, mountain bikers and equestrians. This day there weren’t too many of any of those.

The trail up Ice Box Canyon

As you can see, with all of the snow from last winter and the rain this spring, the vegetation was very lush. We felt like we were running back east rather than out in dry Utah.

10 foot deep washout

Snowbasin base area


Clouds rolling in

We kept on going up to the Snowbasin base area and noticed that the clouds were starting to roll in. Not a good sign. It hadn’t started raining so we thought we at least start up the haul road hoping it might get better. Well, after about a mile up the road, it started raining and the wind picked up. The top of the mountain was completely obscured so we figured we just head back down to the car using a different trail. Definitely a good call since now it was raining pretty good. We actually came across a couple of mountain bikers out in the rain.
Since we were now tanking the run over the top of the mountain we decided it was time for a mud fest and didn’t worry about avoiding any puddles or mud. We had a pretty good time with that.



As we went back down the mountainside, the rain quit and it actually warmed up some.

The trek back down Green Pond trail is one that I enjoying making. The scenery is great and it’s just a nice cruising trail.

Eventually we made it back to the car but noticed that we had 29.4 miles on the GPS. Since we wanted to go 30 miles, we went back up the trail for .3, turned around and came back down. We got some odd looks from some other hikers we had passed on the way down. Even though we didn’t make our goal of going over the top, we still had a great time and got the miles that we wanted.