After moving to Utah I decided that regularly spending time in the mountains was one of the best ways to stay sane and healthy. Since I usually can’t make time for an all-day hike, I developed a habit getting up around 5, hiking hard for a couple of hours, and then getting into the office by 8:30 or 9. This was nice while it lasted but had to stop once I had kids. However, now that they’re a bit older, I hope to start doing early hikes again, at least occasionally.
One of my favorite trails for a quick hike is Broads Fork, which gains about 2000 feet over 2 miles, ending up at a pretty meadow with a small beaver pond. There never seem to be too many people here; the nearby Lake Blanche trail gets most of the traffic. The Broads Fork trailhead is about a 20 minute drive from the University of Utah or about 25 minutes from downtown SLC.
4 responses to “Broads Fork”
When Sarah and I don’t feel like driving over to big or little we do this hike in Emigration: http://www.sltrib.com/csp/cms/sites/sltrib/Outdoors/hikes.csp?hike=414. There’s also a cave somewhere on this trail, but i’ve never found it.
Thanks Scott, I haven’t done that one!
Beautiful pictures!
I’ve been searching for a hike like that near where I am now in Kelowna in the central Okanagan area of BC. The mountains around here just aren’t steep enough! The best we’ve got near enough for us to do a similarly short but work-out worthy hike is going to have 500 to 1000 fewer feet of climbing, and by then you’re already on top of the hill so the views are not quite the same.
Mind you, for a guy who grew up on the prairies as I did, and then lived in southern Ontario for all too long, what we’ve got here is still a big improvement over anything I’ve experienced before!
Hi Greg, I do not know too much about BC but I do enjoy flying past hundreds of mountains and dozens of glaciers while flying to Alaska from the NW USA!
I also spent much time in the plains and it makes me forever happy to have the mountains close by.