Health, History, and Hiking

I've found that it is human nature to internalize, at least to some extent, the things you are exposed to over long periods.  This of course, has implications for media choices and other moral considerations, but today I'm going to focus more on the health implications.  When I was in high school, I worked at Dairy Queen for 3 years.  This meant that I ate a lot more ice cream than usual, because I was around it, working with it, and thinking about it very often.  That wasn't particularly great for my overall health.  I recently started working for a health food company as social media manager, which means I spend all day looking through various health-related info to share.  The byproduct of this is that I spend a lot of time thinking about how I should eat more quinoa and chia seeds and exercising.  I also do a lot with outdoor activities for one of our brands, which means thinking about camping, hiking, and being in nature.  The result of these combined areas of focus is that I've been spending more time exercising in nature recently.

Here's my office

Fortunately, I haven't had to go much out of my way to accomplish this.  My office now is ideally located right across from the Murdock Canal Trail and very near the Provo River Trail.  I decided to check out this new portion of the Murdock Canal Trail first on Friday before Conference.  I described in an earlier post how I have done a decent portion of this trail up in Pleasant Grove and Lindon.  It's really quite a nice trail that's well-paved and passes some interesting areas.  I was excited to see what the Orem section looked like.  Overall, I think I liked the southern end better.  It goes through some more countryish areas that are pretty along the shelf.  It passes right by the Orem City Cemetary and goes through an interesting technology park that hosts companies like Oracle.  The daylight permitted me to walk/jog around 6 miles for the round trip.  Unfortunately, I didn't get far enough north to meet up with the farthest south portion I'd formerly done.  The trail goes all the way up into Lehi, but at sometime I would like to do all of it.

For my next trip, I planned to walk from my office to Bridal Veil Falls on Tues.  This was a very enjoyable walk. The Provo River Trail is very beautiful.  The only slight drawback was that it was quite crowded.  There were a ton of bicyclists and longboarders there as well as a number of other pedestrians and some roller bladers.  Fortunately, it is safer to have plenty of other people around and the wheeled folks have different lanes to use than the pedestrians, so I wasn't all that put out by it in the end.

I've driven through Provo Canyon a few times in the past, but you really do get a different sense for it when walking.  It's quite amazing what one little river can accomplish in wearing down these huge stone mountains!  The trail stays largely in the vicinity of the river, which is pretty, and has several other features throughout to keep it interesting.

Here's one of the aquaduct features.  It used to all be open timber and earthworks, but is now enclosed.

One of the things that I liked was a series of plaques along the trail describing various features associated with the Olmstead Power Plant as well as water conveyance from the canyon.  Most of the plaques had cool historical photos corresponding with the info.  It made me reflect on how impressive the ingenuity and efforts of mankind can be.  Much of the early work in the canyon was all done by hand.  Later, additional work was done by very early steam shovels and similar equipment.  It's pretty incredible what these people were able to accomplish high up in the mountains with very limited resources.

Today, most of the aquaducts and such have been buried to protect from falling rocks and other damage, which definitely happens in the canyon.  There's sections where you can still see the scree left over from past rockslides, one that took out an entire farm that was once there.  You can see it's still a problem even now in that there is a whole section of the Provo River Trail that's been blocked off and a detour built around after a bunch of huge rocks fell on the path. It just goes to show that even with all the incredible things we humans can do with the landscape around us, nature still has power that we cannot control.  In those cases, we just have to work around it!

Here's the section of trail blocked off due to these big falling boulders!

On my first trip up the canyon, I was really hoping to get to Bridal Veil Falls, as I said.  As the sun was setting in the canyon, though, I realized from one of the trail maps that I still had about a mile to go to get there, and still had to go all the way back.  So with some disappointment, I decided to turn around at Canyon Glen Park, one of the many lovely parks along the trail.  I managed to get back to my car just as the sun was going down on the valley itself, so I'm glad I turned back when I did.  In the end, I'd done seven miles and was getting to feel pretty sore in the bargain!

It was interesting on Tues. to discover this section of the river where there were about 6 vintage cars buried.

However, I was not deterred in my goal of walking to Bridal Veil Falls.  On Fri. I decided to pick up where I left off.  I drove up the canyon and parked at Canyon Glen Park to resume my trip.  It didn't take me too long to get to the falls from there.  I did get to pass through Nunn's Park on the way and was enchanted by the camping facilities there right next to the river.  Next spring after Marinda gets back, we will have to go camping there.

I ran into this little guy at Canyon Glen Park.

I've been to Bridal Veil Falls a few times before, but I like it quite well and always appreciate the chance to see it again.  The main drawback is that it is often pretty crowded, which detracts somewhat, but it was a little less busy on Fri that I've seen it in the past.  The thing that surprised me was that the bottom section of it is still entirely covered with a thick layer of snow!  There really isn't much snow to be seen in the canyon now, except up in a few of the very high mountain sections where the sun probably doesn't hit for long, so I was surprised by how much snow was on the waterfall.  I can only guess that the fall itself has contributed to the thick layer.  It was such that the entire path over where the the fall descends to the river was entirely covered, so you had to very carefully pick your way across a pretty large section of snow to cross.

Here's the falls with the snow cover all on the bottom section.  Usually, that's just water.

You can still see a lot of the wreckage from the skyline that used to go to the top of Bridal Veil Falls.  It always makes me kind of sad to see it.  It seems a shame that it's all fallen to ruin, but I guess at some point it was deemed unsafe, partially because of the very steep grade it was pitched at.  I was thinking about how cool it would have been back in the day to go up and visit the Eagle's Nest restaurant and dance hall that used to be there in my parents day.  Unfortunately, a massive avalanche and then an arson's fire put an end to plans to revitalize the resort.

I continued up the trail from the falls.  It was relatively deserted, which surprised me.  Since it was a Fri., I expected to see a lot more people than I did on Tues., but there were in reality not nearly as many overall.  I expect that once I passed the falls, this might be because it was pretty far up the canyon, after many people have turned back, but there surprisingly weren't even that many before I got to the falls.  I guess everyone was busy going on dates elsewhere or something?

I didn't mind having much of the trail largely to myself though.  I saw some more remnants from the old power operations in addition to the current dam.  After the dam, the river obviously widens into a more peaceful lake area, though I'm pretty sure I remember seeing a larger reservoir further up the river toward Midway/Heber.  I guess I'll have to figure all that out at some point.  I also got to see what was left of some of the original banks for the train line through the canyon.  That was pretty cool too.  There is clearly a lot of history through the area, and I'm glad that efforts have been made to preserve some of it.

Here's some ducks and a few of the intermittent bikers enjoying the lake section of the trail.

I again turned back when the sun started to disappear from the canyon.  I hadn't made it as far on this trip, only doing a total of about 5.5 miles.  This was in part due to the fact that I'd forgotten to pack some decent socks and was stuck wearing the no-show footies I'd worn to work.  I expect that's why I ended up with a few blisters after this shorter trip, but maybe my feet were also just sick of walking for the week!

On each of my trips, I had a great time.  I love the way walking gives me a chance to relish in the feeling of covering distance with nothing but my own power.  It also gives me a great opportunity to clear my mind and reflect on things.  I find it very refreshing, even when it leaves my body pretty thrashed by the end.  I'm looking forward to having more opportunities for healthy adventures in the future!