Grand Adventure

Twenty years ago to this month, I went on one of my first Young Men's adventure activities. On the day of the annual Arbon Valley fish fry in Knox Canyon, Steve Purdy took all of the youth on a day long hike up to the highest peak in Power County & Arbon Valley - Deep Creek Peak. We had a great time, and I have always remembered that activity.

Last year, shortly after my back surgery, someone posted a geocache on that peak. I was in no position to go and get it last year, but I vowed that I would be the first person to get that geocache. Well, it has been almost a year since the cache was posted and no one has gotten the cache. We were up in Arbon this weekend, and I wanted to take Aylee and Johnathan on the hike to say that we were able to tackle the mountain.

Monday morning we packed a lunch and some water for the trip. We borrowed Dad's truck and were going to drive up to the top of Knox Canyon to get on the ridge that takes you right up to the peak. This is the easy way up to the peak, but I had a six and eight year old with me, so we figured that would be the best route. We had planned for about a three hour trip.

On the way up the canyon, we ran into a snag. There across the entire road was a tree that had fallen in Sunday's windstorm.

We got out of the truck and analyzed the situation. We put the truck in four wheel drive and tried to go over the smaller part of the tree on the side of the road. However, we just pushed the tree around which started pressing against other still-standing trees. I could just see me knocking down another pine on top of my Dad's truck. We decided to start the hike from that point instead of doing anything to Dad's pickup.

I got out the GPS to try to determine how far we were, but there were too many trees in the area and I couldn't get a good lock on the satellites. We walked about half a mile on the road before I got a lock. After reading the map, I realized that we had a good 1.8 miles as the crow flies to get where we had hoped to get with the truck. On a mountain road that would translate to about 2.5 or 3 miles of hiking - just to get to our starting point.

It had only been about 20 minutes to go three quarters of a mile on the road, but Johnathan was already way behind us and complaining that he wanted to go home. Aylee kept trying to bolster Johnathan's spirits by telling him how cool it would be to get to the top of the mountain. I was starting to wonder if bringing Johnathan was a good idea. However, I decided that if we were to even get close we would have to leave the road and head up the mountain the hard way. That would at least get Johnathan's mind off of things if we were climbing rocks and navigating fallen trees and scratchy brush.

We made a quick turn to the left and followed an old logging road up a steeper side canyon. after about ten minutes on that trail, we hopped off and started bushwhacking the mountain to go straight up to the top. The going was really slow and Johnathan was having a hard time being happy and keeping up. Finally I found out that if I was holding his hand, it would give him more confidence. I ended up holding his hand for a lot of the trip and when I was doing that I hardly heard a complaint from him.



By about 12:15 (the time I had hoped to be on our way back) we finally reached the ridge where we expected to get to originally with the truck. It had been a very hard climb. In those two and a half hours of climbing we had only gone half of a mile. The peak was still over a mile away as the crow flies. It was then that I gave ourselves a time of 1:00 before we would turn around and go back - we were already way behind and I didn't want people worrying.

Now that we were on the ridge, I figured the kids needed a well deserved break. I let them sit down for a few minutes. Aylee sat down for only a few seconds before I heard her screaming and yelling. I looked over and she was frantically brushing herself over and over and freaking out. I asked her what was wrong and between sobs and tears, she said that she was sitting in an ant pile. Sure enough, big red ants were everywhere. I told her to get off of the pile first and then brush off later. She did so, but got quite a number of ant bites in the process. For the next five minutes she kept jumping at every black bug or speck on her clothing. That was the turning point for Aylee.

Now that we were on the ridge, going was a lot quicker. We were really making good time. Aylee, however, was done. She was now the complainer saying that were weren't even on the right mountain and that she wanted to go home. Johnathan, on the other hand, had his second wind and he was the one pumping Aylee up. Pretty soon Johnathan was tired of waiting on Aylee and hearing her complaints so he went on ahead of us. As he walked the ridge line he lifted his arms in the air and yelled, "This is the best day of my life!" He then took off racing up the top of the mountain that we were on.



By 1:00, we were only a half a mile away. We could see the peak from where we were, but I knew that if we were to continue to the top, we would be extending our time by at least 90 minutes - I could just see search and rescue teams scaling the mountains looking for us. I found a rock outcropping where we ate our lunch in the view of our goal. We were now at over 8,000 ft in elevation. I explained to the kids how we were going to have to turn back. They understood, but Johnathan was really wanting to try it still. We, however, turned back for the truck.

Going back to the truck was quicker than climbing up, but it still had its challenges. I tried a shortcut from the one that we took earlier only to find ourselves a bit lost. I had the GPS so we weren't really lost, it is just that I expected to find the road or the logging trail in the bottom canyon. It turned out, however, that in our shortcut we had entered a smaller hollow that was two ridges away from the road. We were in very dense underbrush and the going was very difficult. I was glad that I had the GPS because I knew that if we kept going in the direction of the GPS pointer we would get to the truck, but man it was a weird experience -- the mountains can be so misleading.



We got to the truck by 2:30. We were exhausted and sore. All of us could hardly walk on our tender feet. We arrived to the farm at 3:00 to the welcoming party. We had not reached our goal, but I was glad we had turned back when we did. Dad explained that he had decided that at 3pm they would start looking for us. I could see them going up the canyon and finding the pickup in that unexpected spot and not knowing at all where we had started our climb.




The hike was hard, but the kids did very well. I was proud of them. They ended up going on a much harder hike than they had subscribed too. Although we didn't make it to the top, it was a great experience that we will remember together. It helped us rely on each other. I remember being dead sore and tired at age twelve after finishing that hike. Johnathan was half the age I was when I had made the climb. Aylee is only just over that. We have some amazing kids.

As for Deep Creek Peak...I still want to be the first to find on this cache, so next time we have a day to kill we're headed up again...this time with a chain saw!