| Kings & South Kings Trip Report |
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July 31, 2009 - The longest day of the year. My plan was to hike Kings Peak with my brother Kevin as a day hike on Friday, July 31. I knew I needed to get some sleep before the adventure. So Thursday I went to bed around 6pm. Well it was too light, there was too much noise, it was too hot, I was too excited, and I wasn't tired. So I started watching TV. Finally at about 9:30pm I dozed off to sleep. 1:59 later I woke up one minute before my alarm clock was going to go off. 11:30pm I got up preped for my planned adventure. Ate some breakfast. Packed my stuff and headed to WVC to pick up my brother Kevin at 12:30am. I picked up Kevin at about 1am and we headed to the Henry's Fork trailhead. Kevin hadn't slept at all. So he slept in the car while I drove. We arrived at the trailhead at 3:42am and began to make last preparations to begin the hike. At 3:52am we started up the trail. I signed in at the trailhead and was surprised to see that people actually left their car keys in the sign in box. They must be from ultralight backpackers trying to cut the last few ounces possible. Anyway It was cold and dark and we hiked until a quarter mile past Elk Horn Crossing before we took our first break. We didn't need the break because we were tired. We needed to grab a bite to eat since it had been about 5 hours since the last time we ate anything. It also just became light enough that we didn't need to use the flashlights anymore. Soon we were passing tents near Dollar Lake. And we could now see hikers on the trail ahead of us. We continued passing hikers all the way up to Gunsight Pass where we caught up with my friend Craig and his family. We took our second break there. Elapsed time 3:30. As we cruized over to Anderson Pass a scout group coming from the chute arrived just before us. We took our third and final break at Anderson Pass. The last two times I hiked Kings Peak I struggled up the last 800 feet. Although we hiked this part fairly slow compared to how fast we had been hiking we made good time up and made it to the peak from the trailhead in 5:23 Elapsed at 9:15am. That was almost an hour faster than last year. At the peak we fueled up took some pictures and I was feeling good. Kevin was too. We decided to try to summit South Kings Peak about 1 mile to the south. The hike over to South Kings is not a hard hike, if that's all you do, but after hiking from the trailhead to Kings Peak it is an exhausting hike. We arrived at South Kings Peak one hour later at 10:15am (6:23 Elapsed). We ate again, I finished my water. We took some photos and headed back to Kings Peak. I wasn't feeling as good this time. We made it back to Kings Peak at 11:31am (7:39 Elapsed). When we got to Kings Peak (for the second time) there was a kid up there smacking golf balls off the top. Kevin shared some water with me and we made our down. Below Gunsight Pass we refilled our water bottles. We hiked down near Dollar Lake and stopped to do some fishing. Keving brought two fishing poles that collapse up the size of pens. We hiked down around the stream and we both caught some cutthroats. I landed one, Kevin landed three. After about an hour of messing around fishing we decided we needed to make the long hike out. I don't know why but somehow while we were up on Kings Peak having a great time the forest service managed to lengthen the trail out by about 10 miles or so it seemed to us. The hike from Dollar Lake out to the trailhead was torture. As we hiked the extra 10 miles on the way out I could feel my body giving out. My right IT band was becoming irritated. I was also starting to feel a blister form on my left foot. I was tired from only 2 hours of sleep the night before and my body didn't appreciate the fact that I was only feeding it Powerbars and trail mix. At 6:37pm (14:45 Elapsed), we finally made it to the trailhead. I headed straight to the stinky out house and Kevin headed a couple hundred yards down the road to the car. We both changed our shoes, grabbed some food and water and started the drive home. Kevin was asleep within minutes. I was too but somehow managed to stay on the road until Mountain View. I couldn't take it any longer so we stopped at a rest stop so I could take a nap. After 1/2 hour nap I felt much better. We pulled into the Maverik. I filled the gas tank and grabbed the biggest size banana-blueberry slurpee and drove home.
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