the way to the Bear Canyon Suspension Bridge
HC continues to find ways to pass the long days of summer up in Utah. It isn’t too hard when one is an outdoor enthusiast, and the Wasatch mountains are in plain sight each morning from the guest room he is staying in. A simple google search helps him to find new places to explore for free, mostly centered around hiking trails. On this particular day he chooses to go and find the suspension bridge up in Bear Canyon, somewhere in the hills on the border of the towns Sandy and Draper. He leaves in the late afternoon, clocking the dark rain clouds in the southern distance of the valley.
Parking at Hidden Valley Park, HC starts off by admiring the million dollar homes that line the foothills just below the base of the trail. The tall grasses are brown and dry, a reminder of the potential for a lightning strike that could turn this whole area to ash. So many wildfires in Utah already this summer, sad to say. He takes a picture of the trailhead map and sees he has two options to reach the bridge, as the trail is a loop with the suspension bridge in the middle. He decides to go left and hike away from the oncoming storm. I sign with a large rattlesnake is also pictured, but HC just smiles. He is all too familiar with these from living in Arizona. Caution is noted as he gets going.
The views of the Salt Lake Valley are pretty epic as he starts along the Bonneville shoreline trail, and mostly flat dirt singletrack that both runners and bikers use. He remembers with fondness his mountain biking days from the 90’s. To the north he sees the downtown area and blue skies over the mountains where Elizabeth Smart was kidnapped, the Great Salt Lake and the Oquirrah’s to the West, and to his back the southern rain that is fast approaching. The trail starts to incline and his first view of the suspension bridge is visible.
He switchbacks up the mountain and is soon at the bridge itself. A pretty impressive feat of architecture and as luck may have it, he finds himself alone. Time to pull out the drone and have a little fun on the bridge. The dichotomy of blue skies to his right and dark clouds to his left has him feeling like a Greek God, splitting the sky in two halves, one side to punish, the other to reward. I guess The Odyssey is still in his consciousness.
Seeing if he can avoid getting soaked, HC carries onward, descending the loop back down the mountain. A raindrop falls here and there, but it only helps to cool him down, nothing to bad. A nice little buck deer comes out of the brush into the clearing, and we stare at each other for a moment. The deer realizes he means him no harm, and goes about his business of grazing before disappearing back into the trees. HC ends the hike relatively dry and free of any encounters with rattlesnakes, glad to have hiked the Bear Canyon Suspension Bridge loop trail.
