From Deseret News archives:
Mountains perilous — we know
Of all the dangerous places in Utah, including inside our own homes, the mountains seem to have been the most perilous of places for the two of us over the years.
Lynn was once hiking in Blacksmith Fork Canyon, oblivious as he stepped within inches of a large rattlesnake.
Similarly, Stephen was going for a run on the Pipeline Trail in Millcreek Canyon when he heard an ominous rattle — he screamed and jumped like a little girl, which alerted a mountain biker coming from the other direction.
In each case, neither hiker was injured, only embarrassed.
On another occasion, Lynn was hiking King's Peak, taking pictures of a building thunderstorm along the way. He was intent, however, on getting to the summit. Yeah, he got caught in the storm.
New to Utah about eight years ago, Stephen was climbing a peak in Big Cottonwood Canyon when, on his way down, he found himself clinging to a small tree to avoid a hazardous fall. In a similar incident more recently, he was hiking behind his own home in Bountiful when he realized he had started his descent too late in the day and that he should have used his ascent route for the same path down.
Again, Stephen and Lynn came away without a scratch.
Separately, they've been bumped by a mule on a narrow trail and nearly knocked off a high cliff, stuck on California's Mount Whitney and forced to rely on climbers below as a guide to safety and lost in the Idaho wilderness at dusk with only a few survival supplies and a lot of luck.
At home, they're usually cautious as they clean gutters and hang Christmas lights, or they're careful not to inspect the underside of a lawn mower while it's running. Never mind Lynn's brush with a live electrical wire in a tool shed or a ladder falling while he was on his roof.
As a driver on the road, Stephen still practices what his high school driving instructor taught him. It's an acronym, IPDE, which stands for identify (a potential hazard), predict (what may happen), decide (what action to take to avoid an accident) and execute (your plan of action). It's second nature now, and so far it has kept him out of serious trouble on the road.
Sadly, however, IPDE is not something Stephen, Lynn or most people, for that matter, practice in the wilderness. We hit the trails with the intent of soaking up nature, seeing a wild animal, bagging a peak, etc., and we don't prepare correctly, or we don't think about how to avoid a potential problem.
So let us all take a page from Stephen's book of outdoor adventures, which includes the time he let his own dog get too close to a free-range cow and her calf near central Utah's Wedge Overlook. Let's just say Chico, the dog, lived to bark about it — and he has not since approached a single bovine with even the slightest sniff of curiosity.
E-mail: sspeckman@desnews.com; lynn@desnews.com
