Mount Timpanogos from my home office window
Visiting an Old Friend
Walking with Ghosts up Timpanogos
by Dale Neibaur (10/21/03)
On September 24, 2003 I climbed Mount Timpanogos from Aspen Grove. I have climbed Timp many times, with many dear friends. But since I could find no one to accompany me on this fall Wednesday, I decided to take along a camera and try to capture some of the feeling of being on the mountain. For those of you who have climbed Timp, I hope this will spark happy memories. For those who have never breathed the thin air of a mountain's peak, perhaps this will entice you to come up and make some memories of your own. At least I hope so.
The process of choosing and editing photos has taken longer than I expected. I suppose that shows my relative inexperience in photography. Terry was sweet enough to let me take her brand-new Olympus digital camera along on my walk. With no "cost" associated with burning film, I snapped far more pictures than I normally would have. Even after weeding out the really dull ones and the really blurry ones (far less with digital technology than with my old camera!) I still had more than enough for my purposes. After stringing together the photos I considered the "best" ones, I could see that anyone reading this essay more than once (or needing to stop in the middle and come back later) would need an index to navigate through the photos. So I have created an index of the 50 images I chose to accompany the story of my walk.
I have chosen to leave each image as big as I felt was reasonable to download from the web, and I have put only one image per web page. Truth be told, I would have loved to load each image at "full size" and have the viewer pan over them to get the full picture. Being on a mountain is a "larger than life" experience, where nothing will fit within your immediate view. Always you swivel your neck, looking up, down, over to see how the world extends beyond your gaze. It is an experience that is both overpowering and amazingly intimate. A mountain is vast, but not unreachable. No photo begins to give the impact of the reality; the reality is too big.
Here, then, is an index to my Timpanogos walk:
 | Prologue: your guide for the day | ||||||||||||||||||||||
| The lower mountain: Aspen Grove meadow to the upper falls
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| The switchbacks
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| Emerald Lake
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| The Saddle
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| The Summit
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| Descent to Emerald Lake
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| Descent to Aspen Grove
In details large and small, the mountain is exquisite
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