August 28-29, 2026
I’ve been planning on doing this trip to Gilbert Peak and King’s Peak on my 50th birthday since last year. Those are the only two of the 29 county high points in Utah that I haven’t hiked and I wanted to complete my last one on the day I turned 50. But a couple of months before the trip I began to experience some pain in my left heel, probably a bone spur and/or plantar fasciitis. I immediately ceased all activity on foot–no more hiking, jogging, or even walking the dogs, but I did begin riding my bike to try staying in shape–and I tried different insoles and did stretches and other treatments hoping to heal up before the trip to King’s. I did see some improvement at times but there were a lot of ups and downs, and my heel didn’t feel much better just before the trip than it did when the pain first appeared. I decided to go forward with the trip anyway, despite a rainy weather forecast and the lingering pain. I didn’t have high hopes of completing what would be an ambitious hike of about 35 miles with over 7,000 feet of elevation gain, but I know I also would have deeply regretted not even trying.
My friend Chris timed his visit from Italy to the US so he could join me, even though he’s already summited both Gilbert and King’s twice. I awakened at 4:30 AM on Friday and picked him up in Orem at 6:30, and we drove northeast into Wyoming and then back south into Utah to the Henry’s Fork trailhead. The main parking lot at the trailhead was completely full, as were any wide spots along the road nearby, so we drove back down the road and parked at a primitive overflow area. A sign at that parking area hilariously stated, “Your recreation fees helped fund these services.” What services? It’s just a user-created disturbed area and it’s clear that the only thing the Forest Circus spent any money on is that stupid fucking sign. The lack of parking and even more severe lack of trail maintenance make it clear that the recreation fee collected from every person using this trailhead is being wasted somewhere else.
We shouldered our packs and started walking up the road at first, then the trail. My pack weighed 37 pounds, including two liters of water and food for four days, and it didn’t feel bad at all despite not having hiked for the past two months. My foot felt okay pretty much the entire hike–well, at least it didn’t feel any worse than it had before the trip. I was using trekking poles to try to reduce the weight and strain on my foot but there was really no way to tell if they were doing any good. We stopped to find a couple of geocaches on the way up, and we passed quite a lot of people on their way down.
After the first several miles my upper thighs started to hurt, particularly on the left side, right where the tendons join the hip, but I was able to keep moving despite the pain. We arrived at Dollar Lake, about eight miles in from the trailhead, and set out cross-country up a steep and rugged slope toward where we’d planned to camp that first night. It started sprinkling, and then raining, and the pain in my left leg kept increasing. We were close enough to our camp spot that we didn’t want to stop to put on rain jackets or pack covers, but my leg was slowing us down so much that we probably should have stopped. We reached the general area and looked for a sheltered place to camp but didn’t see anything ideal and instead found some pine trees under which to hunker down and wait out the rain.
After about half an hour the rain slowly let up and we found a decent enough place to camp. The sun came out briefly before the sun set and we got to work on camp chores. We gathered some dry wood and got a fire started, set up our tents, walked a few hundred feet to a stream and got some water to bring back to camp to filter, and then prepared and ate our dinners. We went to bed shortly after 10:00 PM and I managed to sleep okay for a couple of hours. But then around midnight another storm rolled in, and the first gust of wind that violently rocked my tent woke me up and I thought it was a bear. Once my heart rate slowed, my brain was still racing and I kept thinking about what the rest of the night and the next day would bring. I worried that water would seep into my tent that that I’d be wet and cold all the next day. I still wasn’t sure whether I’d be able to hike up Mount Gilbert in the morning with the pain in my leg. I even worried that I’d be too gimpy in the morning to even hike back down the trail to the truck and that with the cold, wet weather moving in, I’d get hypothermic while trying to make it out. The rain and wind came and went throughout the night and woke me up several times.
My alarm went off at 5:30 AM. My tent had stayed dry inside and I was warm, even hot, all night long. But I knew from the pain lingering in my leg that we wouldn’t be summiting any mountains this weekend. I didn’t try waking Chris and instead just started slowly packing up my gear while I made coffee inside the tent. I heard distant thunder around 6:00 AM, and then some elk bugling a while later. Chris got up and we resigned ourselves to packing up camp and just slowly making our way back to the trailhead. I didn’t care so much that I would miss my goal but I felt pretty crummy about dragging Chris along with me for what was essentially a long and pointless backpacking trip. As we packed up camp a cow moose and her calf walked by a short distance away, seemingly unconcerned with us.
We left camp around 7:45 and headed down toward Dollar Lake. As long as I took it slowly and didn’t take too big of steps with my left leg the pain was tolerable. Near the lake we decided to find a geocache that we’d skipped on the way up. While approaching the geocache, a bull moose was kind of lingering around but he would move away from us each time we got closer, right up until we got within about 100′ of the geocache. Then he stood his ground and just turned to stare at us. It wasn’t safe to approach the cache but we didn’t want to leave this one unfound, so we took cover behind some trees and waited him out until he eventually moved on. Then we snagged the cache and headed back down to the lake.
We got back on the trail and started descending. At first I was wondering whether I really could have hiked Gilbert, but a couple of miles down the trail it was clear there’s no way I’d have made it. My thigh/tendon hurt really bad, and we had to stop at least every mile so I could sit and rest. My heel still felt okayish, and it might actually have been able to handle this full trip including the two peaks.
It rained on and off the whole hike down, we donned our rain jackets and pack covers, and I put my camera away to keep it dry so many of the photos below were taken with my phone camera. I hadn’t been using my trekking poles at all this morning because I half-suspected they were somehow to blame for my leg pain. And about halfway back I tried purposefully walking without a limp, which I had been doing in the hopes of not further injuring my heel, and that surprisingly helped with the pain in my upper thigh. Before then I’d been lagging well behind Chris, and now suddenly I was right behind him and wanting to go even faster. I surmised that I’d been somewhat subconsiously babying my foot, and that’s what caused the pain in my upper leg. It still took a couple of days for that leg pain to go away so doing Gilbert and King’s wasn’t really an option despite now knowing what was wrong.
We got back to the trailhead and had hiked 18 miles total in about 28 hours. On the way home we kind of formulated a plan for the next two days that we’d originally planned on spending backpacking. I dropped Chris off in Orem and then went home, and he joined me early the next morning and we did some short hikes in Nine Mile Canyon and Arches National Park. We managed to salvage what remained of my long birthday weekend. I wasn’t too bummed about not finishing my goal by my 50th and, in fact, enjoyed being in the desert rather than the mountains on my birthday. And now that I’m not necessarily trying to let my foot heal by completely staying off it, I can resume hiking, which makes me happy. I suppose I’ll aim for those final two county high points next year, after my foot fully heals and I can do them at my leisure rather than on a fixed schedule.
Photo Gallery: Henry’s Fork