By Michael Lanza
The strongest signal that late afternoon has begun its inexorably precipitous October slide into a freezing evening comes as my son, Nate, and I step from almost-warm sunshine into the deep shade of a peak whose shadow tops out at over 13,000 feet in eastern Utah’s High Uintas Wilderness. The wind cranks up in volume as we continue upward, wearing shell jackets with hoods up, wool hats, and gloves while carrying full backpacks uphill at a lung-busting elevation—and still feeling just marginally warm enough.
Crossing Gunsight Pass at 11,880 feet, Nate and I confer and quickly agree on modifying our goal for today: We’re not heading up to Anderson Pass and Utah’s highest mountain, Kings Peak at 13,528 feet, in the waning daylight, recognizing that we’d ultimately finish this day by headlamp, hunting around in the dark for a decent campsite in the valley on the other side of and far below Kings.
Instead, we take the trail dropping into Painter Basin, finding a camp for our first night in grass and scattered rocks on a nearly treeless plateau practically at the toe of Kings Peak, just as the mountain’s long, pyramidal shadow advances over the basin. Some three miles across at its widest point, Painter is one of the many vast, stark, high basins that define this range as much as its nearly two dozen summits over 13,000 feet.
It will prove a wise decision on a trip where we’d already collaborated in sandbagging ourselves—without yet fully realizing how badly. But I’m getting a little ahead of myself.
We’ve come to backpack about 58 miles, from the Henrys Fork Trailhead—the shortest approach to Kings Peak—to the western terminus of the Uinta Highline Trail at Hayden Pass on the Mirror Lake Highway/UT 150. I’d backpacked in the High Uintas and hiked up Kings before, with my wife and daughter and a friend of our daughter’s (on this trip); but Nate had recently decided that, after living in Utah for five years (since beginning college there), he needed to finally account for the glaring omission of the state’s high point from his outdoor resume.
And we’ve both had a growing interest in the Uinta Highline Trail, which traverses the range for more than 100 miles, mostly over 10,000 feet, with eight named passes—four each exceeding 11,000 and 12,000 feet. On our four-day hike, we’ll cross seven passes, just one of them (Gunsight) not on the Uinta Highline Trail, ranging from just over 11,200 feet to the trail’s high point, Anderson Pass at around 12,700 feet. And we intend to tag Kings Peak.
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One key fact about our plans: We’ve come in the first week of October, normally beyond the peak season for hiking in many Western mountain ranges because of the real prospect of snow falling or, at the least, cold rain, as well as sub-freezing temperatures at night and possibly during the days. But we saw a forecast for days of dry, unseasonably mild weather and decided to jump on it.
And as much as the forecast, we were excited about the prospect of yet another father-son adventure together—a countless number of which he, now 24, and I have shared since he was too young to remember our earliest, little-kid-appropriate trips.
More than either of us expected, we would end up, in almost equal parts, as awed by the majesty of the Uinta Highline Trail, and the High Uintas in general, as humbled by how tough it is.
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Anderson Pass, Kings Peak, Tungsten Pass, and Porcupine Pass
We awaken before the sun reaches us at 7 a.m., at 11,400 feet in Painter Basin, to find ice crystals in water bottles and heavy frost coating everything, including sleeping bags—as will happen on all three clear, dry, cold nights we’re out here, sleeping under the stars. (We pitched the tent we brought only the first night, just in case.) Cocooned inside our fat bags, we feel none of the dampness or cold, even though the heat coming off our bags melts the frost on the shells of our bags. (See the Gear I Used section below.) We eat a hot breakfast while gazing up at a wall of 13,000-foot peaks, including Kings, burnished golden by the rising sun.
The chilly morning air provides a balanced counterpoint to the warm sun and cool breeze once we start hiking west on the Uinta Highline Trail, climbing steadily over a moonscape of rocky ground almost devoid of vegetation. Ninety minutes after leaving our camp, we drop our packs at Anderson Pass, at 12,700 feet, and after a bite, start up the mountain’s standard route, the rocky north ridge of Kings.
We’ve seen no one since yesterday afternoon on the Henrys Fork Trail, a warm, sunny Sunday, where we ran into several hunters hiking out because they’ve seen no elk (too warm) and backpackers and a few dayhikers returning from Kings Peak. So, of course, minutes after I tell Nate, “We might join a short list of people who’ve had Kings Peak to themselves,” we see two guys descending toward us; they reached the summit and are heading back to the Henrys Fork Trailhead. Like everyone else we’ve spoken with in our first 24 hours out here, they have no intention of continuing west on the Uinta Highline Trail. In our sample population of survey respondents, we were the only ones with that plan.
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Not surprisingly, given that it’s early October, we’ll enjoy a rare degree of solitude on most of our four days out here. Indeed, for the rest of today—a day we’ll hike about 12 miles and cross three passes, in addition to scrambling Kings—we will run into just two other pairs of backpackers, one couple and two men that could be father and son, both heading east on the Highline in the sprawling basin of Yellowstone Creek. Both say we’re the first people they’ve seen.
While a chilling wind scours Anderson Pass and the north ridge of Kings as we ascend it, we step onto the summit in mild, dead calm air. It feels like early September. So, we linger a while on the roof of Utah, drinking up the 360 of towering peaks and creek basins you could drop a small city into.
Some two hours later, a couple miles west of Anderson Pass on the Highline Trail, the sun feels so hot that we stop to zip off pant legs to convert to shorts and strip down to a single light top each. When clouds block the sun, though, it feels much cooler, and strong gusts of icy wind hit us intermittently.
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“The air temp is about 50 and when the wind blows, it feels like 35,” I tell Nate. He finishes my thought: “In the sun, it feels like 70.” It’s that time of year in the mountains: We’ll stop several times today to add or strip off layers, cycling between tolerating too many layers for the sun or not wearing enough for the wind and clouds.
But by later that afternoon, those periods of sunshine feel like a distant memory. Clouds lock arms and march across the sky and cold wind buffets us without pausing to catch its breath. Squalls erupt suddenly, pelting us with graupel as we approach Tungsten Pass, at 11,400 feet—which must be the easiest on the entire Uinta Highline Trail, sitting not very many steps uphill from the basins to either side of it.
We walk across Garfield Basin, yet another vast valley of more than two dozen scattered alpine lakes, sprawling grassy meadows, and conifer forest below around 11,000 feet. Beyond a windblown cluster of tiny lakes and tarns in the upper end of the basin, we climb through switchbacks to Porcupine Pass at 12,200 feet—our third today, in addition to hiking Kings Peak—just as the sun pierces the dark armor of the overcast, throwing brilliant yellow light onto the clouds, the cliffs embracing the basin ahead of us and the lakes far below where we stand. (See lead photo at the top of this story.)
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The scene stops us cold. Nate mutters, “Wow, that’s amazing,” or something like that. Even as the colder wind and the temperature dropping faster than the sun herald the rapid approach of another freezing night—and we can clearly see the several hundred vertical feet and perhaps as much as two miles of hiking between this pass and a prospective camp—we can’t help but linger for several minutes, clicking cameras and just quietly watching one of those moments that sear themselves into the memories from a trip.
Nate races ahead in search of a camp and I follow as quickly as I can. A little while later, not long before sunset, I join him at a patch of level dirt near a small creek several hundred feet off the trail, at around 11,500 feet in the nearly flat plateau at the upper end of this basin. There are no trees, boulders, or even rises or hollows in the terrain to temper the wind.
We lay out our pads and bags to sleep under a night sky liberally salted with twinkling specks from tiny to beaming, amid and around the wide smear of the galaxy. We count several shooting stars before nodding off.
I spotlight the High Uintas as an alternate to the Wind River Range in my story
“America’s Top 10 Best Backpacking Trips.”
Red Knob Pass and Dead Horse Pass
Another morning of ice in water bottles and bags wet from the overnight frost greets us when we rise shortly after 6 a.m., as the first light appears in the eastern sky. It feels colder than yesterday. Nate and I pack up hurriedly and throw down a hot breakfast, fingers numbed, eager to get moving for the warmth it’ll bring and because we have many miles to walk today.
We hike for about an hour in the deep and frigid shade of a ridge that rises to well over 12,000 feet. The wind amplifies the cold, but walking quickly, we soon warm up enough to shed our shells and warm hats; once we enter the direct sun, it feels almost balmy again.
The shade and bright sunlight meet along a high-contrast divide splicing the basin ahead of us, a snaking line moving patiently, the shade retreating at the sun’s pace. The sun’s low angle seems to make every angle in the landscape more visible, giving our eyes a superpower to see everything more clearly—every knob and twist in every ridge, every draw and hollow and creek bottom, all the throw rugs of conifer forest strewn across the basins, every subtle variation in the color spectrum of nature.
The world reveals itself to us in the morning and evening light of the low sun. I love getting on the trail this early.
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The High Uintas, the highest of the few mountain ranges in the contiguous 48 states with an east-west orientation, span about 150 miles end to end, but are also broad enough to demand significant time and effort to reach the remote, upper ends of these high basins on foot. The most direct north-south trails across the range often measure about 40 miles.
And therein lies an immutable truth about finding solitude: Hike deeper into the backcountry and you’ll get beyond where most people are go, for no more simple reason than that carrying a backpack that far is both hard and time-consuming. (See my “12 Expert Tips for Finding Solitude When Backpacking.”) We see more signs of trail maintenance, like fresh cuts on blown-down trees (along those occasional stretches of the Uinta Highline in forest), than signs of people. Throughout this day, we will not see another person.
For several miles west of Porcupine Pass, we hike across this gently undulating, high basin, framed by continuous rows of mountains muscling into the sky. The Uinta Highline Trail grows faint and even disappears for long stretches—clearly not receiving enough human traffic to even beat a visible footpath into this dirt and grass. But cairns nearly as tall as an adult, rockpiles visible from a distance, help us stay on course.
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We climb through several switchbacks to another of the Uinta Highline Trail’s best passes, Red Knob, at 12,000 feet, overlooking the lake-filled basin of West Fork Blacks Fork Creek, nearly enclosed within a ragged horseshoe of severe, castle-like peaks. A few hundred yards in the distance, a lone mountain goat meanders along the barren, rocky ridge rising above the west side of the pass.
Ninety minutes later, after descending into and hiking up that basin, we reach the shore of windblown Dead Horse Lake, at around 10,900 feet, one of well over a thousand lakes in the High Uintas. The clouds thicken and the wind bares its teeth. The tall, foreboding cliffs and sheer buttresses that soar several hundred feet tall above the lake hint at the grueling ascent to Dead Horse Pass that lies ahead of us.
Beyond the lake, the trail immediately tilts sharply upward and weaves through blocks of talus, some easily weighing a ton or more. Then it grows even steeper and frequently consists of no more than a goat path of boot prints across sliding scree. I glance to my downhill side a few times just to mentally estimate how long a tumble might result from a slip of a foot.
A slow, steady grind brings us to Dead Horse Pass, at 11,600 feet. I tell Nate, “I think I know what killed the horse.”
The wind and downward arc of the air temperature puts an exclamation point on the fact that it’s 5 p.m. and daylight grows short. We take just a few minutes to drink and snack while looking back over the sea of peaks surrounding and beyond the basin of West Fork Blacks Fork Creek, and then turn around for our first look at the basin of Rock Creek ahead of us, several miles across. Then we hustle downhill, reaching Ledge Lake in under an hour, boiling water for dinner and laying out pads and bags for one last night under this megalopolis of stars.
In camp, Nate scrolls his phone screen surveying our route map, and says, “Oh, no.” I ask what that’s about and he says we have farther to walk tomorrow, our last day, than we both expected: 15 miles. And I respond with genuine surprise: “What?!”
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See all stories with expert backpacking tips at The Big Outside, including these:
“Bear Essentials: How to Store Food When Backcountry Camping”
“How to Prevent Hypothermia While Hiking and Backpacking”
“8 Pro Tips for Preventing Blisters When Hiking”
“5 Tips For Staying Warm and Dry While Hiking”
“7 Pro Tips For Keeping Your Backpacking Gear Dry”