Hand Crack and Singletrack: Running in BCC sure is Draining

This week's challenge was to see how many drainages in BCC I could tackle with emphasis on ones I hadn't done before. There are quite a few.

Fun BCC trail

Monday: ~8 miles, 3000'
Up Days Fork to Flagstaff Peak then down Cardiff Fork via Cardiff Pass in rainy, windy, and overall miserable freezing cold conditions. Unlikely start to a scorcher of a week.

Tuesday: Soloed Crescent Crack and Bong Bong Firecracker(best route name ever) up LCC, both 5.7. On steep bushwack descent walk off the Sail I somehow impaled myself with a tree branch and had to hobble back to the car with decent amounts of blood flow from the calf injury. Now I know why people rap off the Sail.

Thursday: 10 miles, 4000'
Up Mineral Fork to summit of Peak 10820, then down Lake Blanche. Mineral Fork is awesome but super rocky and steep. Quite a few mountain goats up there. No one on Lake Blanche trail. Trick is to go at 930 pm in the dark.

Saturday: Ski Resort Quadfecta. 15 miles, 7000'
Didn't plan on doing the quadfecta but it came as a natural consequence of my plan for the day. After performing trail work at the Silver Lake center doing plant restoration for my Wasatch requirement, I headed up for what I hoped would be a difficult linkup. My day started off poorly as I drove up the wrong dirt road to access Silver Fork and somehow got the Hyundai front centered on a dirt burm of sorts with my front wheels not touching the ground(which is bad in a front wheel drive car). I spent 20 minutes digging and with the help of some logs and a random pipe I found, was able to excavate the Hyundai. Despite its performance last week on Notch Peak, the Hyundai is not a ATV.

Up Silver Fork(different from Silver Lake), down Grizzly Gulch to Snowbird, up trails to Alta and Catherine Pass, then down Lake Mary trail to Brighton, over to Twin Lakes trail and a pass of the same name, then up the Honeycomb Peaks of Solitude then down Honeycomb Fork to the car.

Finishing at 8 pm or so, I found myself in another predicament. To access Silver Fork you must enter the Solitude resort parking area, and when I tried to leave I found the gate with a sign that said "gate closes at 7 pm", which I had promptly ignored, locked. I was now trapped inside. My options were jump the fence and ditch the Hyundai and hitchhike, use the Hyundai as a battering ram, off road the Hyundai through the river gorge, wait for someone to come and open it(likely next morning) or find someone to open it for me. Luckily there was a nice local staying at their cabin a mile back who I asked to let me out and did so. DON'T PARK IN THE SOLITUDE PARKING LOT!