Mount Timpanogos, Limestone and Legend

Rising to eleven thousand seven hundred and fifty-two feet above sea level, Mount Timpanogos dominates the skyline east of Provo in a way that makes it hard to think about anything else. It is the second-highest peak in Utah's Wasatch Range, and from the valley it presents a profile that has been described, since at least the early twentieth century, as the silhouette of a sleeping woman. The mountain is built almost entirely of limestone and dolomite laid down during the Pennsylvanian period, roughly three hundred million years ago, sediment deposited in shallow tropical seas that existed here long before the Rockies were a thought.

The caves punched through that limestone are the reason Timpanogos Cave National Monument exists just inside American Fork Canyon: a settler named Martin Hansen, cutting timber, followed mountain lion tracks up the canyon wall in October eighteen eighty-seven and discovered a cavern he had not known was there. He began leading paid tours the following year. In July nineteen twelve, Eugene Roberts, BYU's athletic director, organized the first mass summit hike, leading twenty students to the top.

He turned the event into an annual pageant and a promotional campaign to put the mountain on the map. Thousands came. The hike grew so popular that by its last year in nineteen seventy, it was drawing hikers in numbers that were visibly eroding the alpine ecosystem.

The mountain stopped hosting the mass event. It did not stop drawing people. Today it remains one of the most-hiked peaks in the state, fourteen miles round trip, five thousand three hundred feet of gain, and that limestone summit rising above everything.