Utah Adventure Journal

You are browsing the archives of Meghan Hicks.

  This past Memorial Day weekend, while most of us were grilling brats and drinking our favorite beverages, Buzz Burrell, Jared Campbell, and Ryan McDermott were engaged in the quirkiest ‘triathlon’ you’ll probably never hear of again.   In a nonstop push, the trio traversed Zion National Park from its west to east. Not by […]

The Wasatch Front 100 Mile Endurance Run If someone tells me that an experience is part heaven and hell, I conjure images of unending purgatories, masochistic preferences, and insane people who can’t decipher the difference between pain and pleasure. It is perfect, then, that the motto for the Wasatch Front 100 Mile Endurance Run, the […]

I stand on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon as tourist hordes ebb and flow around me. They are schools of flashy fish, their cameras, ice-cream cones, and clackety-clack-against-sidewalks shoes grabbing snippets of my attention. I smell sunscreen and sweat, and the odors cause me to tilt my head to the sun. It looks […]

A thunderstorm rolls away, a curtain of angry rain sweeping east. The leftover air is cold and humid. Danni and I shoulder our packs and unceremoniously walk down the trail. From the Mirror Lake Trailhead in the Uinta Mountains, we begin our trek of the 80-mile Highline Trail.   The Highline Trail reaches east-west through […]

In the red rocks surrounding Moab, the Earth’s skin splinters into a million, trillion towers, fins, spines, spikes, hoodoos, mesas, arches, and rock formations so strange that they yet possess no name. The on-the-ground feel of this geologic jumble is a sense that one has wandered into a massive and infinite maze, or pretty much […]

When you roll off your last ski run and into a hot-tub soak, when the chairlifts come to their quiet halts, when sunset leaves behind a black night: magic happens. Come every evening at each of Utah’s fourteen ski resorts, tiny armies of men and a few women climb into massive, machinated beasts of mountain […]

My skis point toward Champion, a moguled black diamond ski run at Park City’s Deer Valley. A thousand feet below, the colorful, ant-size children of ski school move helter skelter atop winter’s white blanket in front of the Snow Park Lodge.   At the run’s edge, a sign marks the spot: the 2002 Winter Olympics […]

In the lower left corner of Utah lies a table of seashell-colored sandstone fit for a family of heavenly giants. If something of the colossal kind dined there, they’d pull a chair up to 200-million-year-old cliffs composed of scarlet and carmine shale holding the table 1,000 vertical feet over the rest of the Earth. Called […]

I’m sitting at the dining room table of professional cyclist Evan Hyde. The 26-year-old Park City resident curves his rounded rider’s shoulders around Eddie, a mutt with an old-man beard, as if he’s holding a baby. Evan kisses Eddie’s head, and the dog’s arms and legs go lax. “What can I say?” says Evan when […]