I started school on Monday and dealt with that the first part of the week. Thursday I hooked up with Bucky and went touring? yes touring. We headed out for some exercise and to laugh at our 2012 winter conditions. The tour was fun, the riding sucked, and the weather nice. I’ve been wanting to check out some place new so I pitched the idea of doing a run/scramble out west somewhere. I wish I had checked out Doug’s report from Antelope before hand as that run looks like a lot of fun. We ended up going up the southern most high point of Stansbury Island. I wore running shoes, tights, and shorts thinking I was going to run up to the ridge and scramble from there. That would prove to be false. There is no trail system and the ground has a lot of loose rock so we ended up just hiking up to the South Ridge. Soon we were at the ridge and had great views from here up it was all 3rd class rock moves. The rock was pretty loose and we both moved awkwardly as both of us are out of practice on rock. The route was fun with a lot of room for variation. A few traverses onto the southeast aspect of the rock left us slightly exposed, but it felt really good to be in the sun. The crux of the route is a tall wall with some chimney systems going up. The rock was loose but solid enough, and the pitch steep enough to be exciting for a couple of novices like us. After pulling the moves up that short section we were on the summit ride. The summit ridge is long and made up of several summit points. We hopped, skipped, and jumped across the ridge to the northern ridge system and our way down. The way down was lame with a few inches of snow covering loose rock. It also put us a few drainages away from the car, but it saved us a lot of down climbing. Even though today wasn’t my big “get back into running” day that I had hoped, it was still a lot of fun. The mountain ranges to the west of salt lake are pretty amazing in a weird way. Desolate and lonely, but I really enjoy them.
