Squaw Peak, elev 7,876' Feb 2006

I talked my brother-in-law, Jeff, into going with me which wasn’t very difficult since he’s always up for an adventure. We had some things to take care of before we left so we didn’t actually leave for the trail head until about 11:50. We decided to hike Squaw Peak by the trail up Rock Canyon, even though I had heard rumors of another trail that reaches the summit from the west. Since I’m still a bit of a novice and the other trail requires a bit of bushwhacking and scrambling, I thought I better stick to the road more traveled.
We arrived at the Rock Canyon trail head at about 12:10. When we left my house in Provo, I had 3 inches of snow on my lawn so we knew we’d need to bring our hiking poles to have any hope of stability hiking through what we expected to be fairly deep snow.
The trail starts fairly flat on a paved trail for the first few hundred yards and at this point there was only intermittent snow and ice. Once we got to the gate, the trail steepened slightly and we were on constant snow. The hike was as pretty as always, meandering by the snow covered riverbed that runs down Rock Canyon. We crossed the river a few times and after about 1.57 miles (according to my GPS) we found the turn off to Squaw Peak.
The turn off is marked by a sign with a hiker pointing to the left, even though the trail to Rock Canyon Campground was much more traveled and continues off to the right. This is where the hiking got a little harder for us. Thankfully, it was apparent that a few snowshoers had been up the trail a couple of days before and had packed down much of the snow which made life a lot easier. Occasionally, we would still sink a few inches but for the most part, aside from a few steep ascents, the hike was still pretty easy going.
We continued hiking north along this trail for about 1.5 miles (my GPS unit was in and out of satellite range for a time so this is a guestimate) until the trail suddenly turned west and brought us to what looked like would be a fairly big meadow in the summer. From this point on, it was fairly obvious where we would need to go to reach the summit but we didn’t dare veer off the trail because the snow levels were about chest deep according to our unscientific method of measuring by sticking our hiking poles in the snow off to the side of the trail. The trail continued west and then south with occasional views of the valley floor below as we climbed up the ridge to reach our final destination - the summit!
Once on the summit we had an outstanding view of the valley below and could also see Y-mountain’s twin peaks just to the south, Cascade just behind us to the north and Timpanogos looming a little farther north, it’s high peaks in the clouds. We rested for a while at the top, had a little snack and some hot chocolate, which really hit the spot, and called our wives to tell them that we were at the top. They took out the binoculars and could see us on the summit when we were standing in front of a snow bank.
It took us about 3 hours total to reach the summit (1.5 hours hiking and 1.5 hours resting and taking pictures), though without the snow it would have been a much faster hike. It was getting a bit late so we thought we better get moving. The hike down was much easier aside from a few slips here and there going down the steep sections of the trail covered with snow. We made it down to our car in about an hour, knowing that we would be plenty sore in the morning!