Bridal Veil Falls- Not your everyday hike!

Well, I've been looking for something spontaneous and epic enough to post and during my entire stay in Utah i think this one by far takes the cake. Truly an Austin epic experience. Last friday I caught a break from work and i came home to my roommates packing up to hike bridal veil falls and camp at the old abandoned restaurant at the top of the mountain. I looked out the window, saw the clouds looked back at the roommates and they said "we'll be fine" i shrugged my shoulders and then said "why not", packed up my things in 20 min and we were on our way.

15 Minutes up the provo canyon and we were already at the base of the mountain. Its weird to think that I live 15 minutes from what id soon find out to be one of the sketchiest hikes of my life. From the very start in my head i thought it would have been a hike Austin would enjoy a lot. The hike itself was only about 5 miles, but it was 5 miles of straight up hill switchbacks filled with rick climbing up waterfalls hanging on to ropes and wire left from the few previous hikers that have actually hiked bridal veil. 3/4 of the way through the hike we came to a point where we needed to scale a 10 ft rock wall with a 30 lb pack on my back to get to the rope to pull myself up and scale another 35ft straight up to continue on the trail, so gnarly. Right when i though that i had just climbed the sketchiest point of the hike we'd get up another switchback and then there would be another point of the hike where id have to scale something suspended over 700 ft in there air. 

But i know without a shadow of a doubt Austin was there right behind me giving me that little extra push placing my feet and hands on the mountain where they needed to be so that id be able to summit the mountain. Unfortunately all the parts I mentioned i was unable to document due to the sketchiness of the hike i didn't have an extra hand to take a picture haha. We finally get to the end stretch which was a steel cable leading about 100 yards up the mountain at an 68 degree incline, everyone started to put on there repelling gloves but the girl in front of me decided not to so i thought to myself if she will be ok then i should be as well....big mistake. the wire was frayed in numerous places and its not something i could just let go of without rolling down the hill. After we finally get up that incline its about a quarter mile hike and the trail was 3 feet wide with mountain on one side and a sheer drop on the other side, and this was the mellow part of the hike. The destination we hiked to was an old restaurant that burned down and there was just the warped metal scaffolding left and a slab of concrete.

We all hung out hammocks we were going to sleep in crawled into them and tried to sleep because by the time we had got up there the sun had just set. I didnt get more than 30 min of sleep when I heard the first clash of thunder that woke me up. I looked over to my roommates Nolan and David and they both woke up too the lighting was a few miles away so we didnt worry too much that we were 1000 ft up on a mountain surrounded by metal at this point. So we all tried to sleep again while the rain drizzled down. The next time I woke up I was startled by thunder and lightening and this time the rain was POURING! We counted the time between the lighting flash and the sound of thunder to determine how far away it was actually striking, after a few minutes of trying to figure out if we needed to move or not we got down to about half a second in between lighting and the thunder clap well all unanimously hurried to a cave we spotted before setting camp to be sheltered from the rain and hopefully not have to worry about getting struck by lightening surrounded by metal haha. 

So that night in total all of us prob averaged about 1-2 hours of sleep at most. The next morning we woke up to beautiful sunrise over the mountains with partial cloud cover.....Then it started to rain again. So we decided we needed to go now or never because the storm was only about to get worse. We then hiked down what I thought was gnarly before, but now that everything was wet it was even 10 times harder. 

We got to to our first repel and i was soooo pysched there was a beautiful waterfall to the left and 

So we got to repel 200ft down it. It was such an incredible experience something id like to share with you all. I can picture me explaining this to Austin in much greater detail telling him how sketchy and how crazy fun the hike was and i cant imagine his response would be any different than "lets do it". I love you buddy miss you tons and ill keep on going on adventures and trips and anytime i have any doubt that ill be able to do it or if im being lazy or get pysched out ill always think to myself, Austin would go.

 Love Jeff