Trailing Ahead : Adventures in Hiking Utah

Buffalo Peak Trail

Dixie and I picked up a copy of 60 Hikes Within 60 Miles: Salt Lake City (Including Ogden, Provo, and the Uintas) a few weeks ago and today we began a project to start each of the 60 hikes in the guidebook. A secondary goal is to finish each of the hikes (a few of them are well over 10 miles, so we'll see how we hold out). The project is about getting healthy doing something together that we both enjoy (hiking) and I will be tracking our progress on this photo blog.

I sorted the hikes by mileage and then difficulty (follow the link to see my spreadsheet) to make it easier for us to choose which ones to start out with. Today we tackled Buffalo Peak, which is the shortest hike with a difficulty rating of one, though after hiking it I'd bump it up to a two (because of the steep final part of the trail). Finding the trail head was easier than I thought it might be (the directions were spot on), though the dirt road was quite bumpy. Here's what the trail head looks like from the road.

As you can see, the last part of the trail is quite steep.

Here's a photo of Squaw Peak, the more famous, but shorter cousin directly to the south of Buffalo Peak.

The book recommends Spring for this hike because of the wildflowers.

There she is, the love of my life and the awesomest wife in the world.

From the top of Buffalo Peak you get a 360 view of Utah Valley and the surrounding mountains.

This campsite can be seen on the way back from the peak, so you could overnight this hike.

Going back down.

Squaw Peak again, with Mt. Nebo in the far distance.

Can you tell I like wildflowers?

Getting in the car to head back down the dirt road that branches off of Squaw Peak Road.

Squaw Peak Trailhead

The guidebook suggests driving over to the Squaw Peak overlook and we saw a trail there and got on it to see where it went. We only followed it to the first peak, which turned out to be the peak north of Buffalo Peak, and that it traveled on to Buffalo Peak from the other side. I later found out that the Squaw Peak trail goes all the way down to Springville. Here are some photos from that first stretch of trail (super steep at places, even other hikers commented on it as they past us).

Lavell Edwards Stadium at BYU, as seen from the trail.

The Riverwoods and the Tahitian Noni Buildings.

What a cool rock!

I really dig this moss.

There's day one of our adventure. Happy trails!