It's not every day that you have a run-in with a bull moose. I brought my work out clothes to work today hoping to get in a run during my lunch break, but I didn't know where I wanted to go. Jun gave me a great idea to run the Little Cottonwood river trail aka the Temple Quarry Trail. It sounded like a great run and it is only 10 minutes from my office.
The trail follows the river up the canyon for 2.6 miles. The scenery is fantastic and the weather was just about perfect. You really can't beat the views of the canyon walls and river that you get on this trail. The run up was a little slow and I was working the kinks out. It isn't extremely steep, but it is uphill the whole way.
It took me 30:20 to run the 2.6 miles up to the river crossing and I stopped and took a short break. I wanted to run fast on the way down, so I just ran hard and except for a few technical sections I was able to keep up a really good pace.
I was about a mile down and running between a 6:30-7:00 pace and a bull moose jumped out onto the trail about 10 feet in front of me. I didn't even have time to process what was going on, but luckily he took off running going the same direction as I was. I quickly stopped and watched as he ran about 30 yards and then stopped. I was hoping that he wasn't going to come back to confront me, so I waited for a few seconds and then started to slowly walk. At that point he took off running down the trail, and I slowly followed walking for the next 100 yards or so. Talk about an adrenaline rush. I have seen several moose while playing in the outdoors, but I have only had one, well, maybe two other experiences that rivaled this one. It certainly wasn't just an average run.
I made it back down to the car in 18:40 for a total time of 49:00 | 