Stansbury Island 2017

I took a small WMC group on a very fun but very rugged hike in October to the striking peak in the southwest of the island, just east of the BLM bicycle trailhead. It's a huge, steeply tilted quartzite block with cliffs on the east and slabs on the west. I didn't take a GPS reading, but the top is roughly 6000 feet high and resides at 40° 48' 34.7" N 112° 30' 19.0" W (a guess based on Google Maps). I had climbed this peaklet a couple of times many years ago, clearly long enough ago that I had forgotten just how relentlessly steep and scrambly it is.

But it's all fairly straightforward class 3 on good rock, if you are persistent about routefinding. We had perfect conditions and the group never gave up. We left the BLM parking lot (at 40° 48' 23.2" N 112° 31' 13.0" W) and struck southeast-ish on the trail. After a few minutes, we got to the toe of the slab and started slogging up the ridge formed by the edge of the slab. At this point we were working our way between outcrops on steep lakebottom sediment, pausing at the Provo and Bonneville wave benches for a breath. Once above the highest lake level, the routefinding challenges increased substantially. For a long time, the best going was right on the edge of the slab or just over it to the east, taking great care never to get cliffed out. The crags here are very scenic, with artistically placed juniper trees and big piles of rectangular quartzite blocks.

We finally came to a (familiar) step where cliffs prevented progress along the edge. We worked our way out onto the western slab, and found routes that zigzagged tortuously up the face. We tried to stay fairly close to the ridgeline but kept getting forced northward (left) across the slabs by more cliffs and crags. After scrambling up a moderately awkward chute, I was rewarded by the view of a bizarre tilted flake that I had seen on both previous trips. We passed behind the flake and came out on the summit ridge.

It felt like we must be almost at the summit, but inconveniently the high point was still a fair distance to the north. There were simple traverses to the west around most of the crags, but the junipers made it hard to see far ahead, and we kept expecting to reach the top with each crag. Finally we reached the end, which is not quite the northernmost bump on the ridge. The tiny summit is a short scramble up more of the rectangular blocks, with a cliff to the east and a fantastic view in every direction. Since there wasn't enough room for everyone to stand on top, much less have lunch on top, we retreated to the next bump to the south.

On the previous trips, I made a nice loop by heading west down the slab, and I tried to do that this time too. I wanted to go down the slabs a bit to the south of the summit, but I was thwarted repeatedly by cliff bands and washouts and inconvenient trees. In the end, we made our way carefully down to a V-shaped wedge of limestone lying on top of the quartzite, and followed the south edge of the wedge down to the Bonneville wave bench. From there, we contoured southwest to a section of the Provo bench, then followed that bench southwest to where it meets the ridge that is on the north side of the parking area. As we dropped down that ridge to the west, I remembered that it had some nice fossils. I kept looking for them and failing to find anything very special, until all of a sudden there were zillions of them — corals, brachiopods, bryozoans, cephalopods.

If you want to do this hike, take a lot of care with your routefinding and be prepared for a lot of (fun) scrambling!

go to the Stansbury Island gallery