Met Scott and Matt VH at the Bountiful 'B' at 5:00 a.m. We drove up to the Bountiful aid station of the Wasatch 100 course. Our plan was to run from there to Francis Peak and back following the course route. Since we started in the dark, we set out on the wrong trail. It led us up the mountain rather than along side it like we were expecting. We decided to continue that direction and run the course on the way back. After summitting Centerville Peak, we bushwacked our way to Skyline Drive. Once on the road, we ran up to Bountiful Peak. The views were great. We ran some good downhill miles on Skyline Drive over to the maintenance shed. We decided that we would not have time to go to Francis Peak, so we hopped on the Wasatch 100 course. We were doing a good job of following the course until we came to a stream crossing. We couldn't see any trails on the other side of the stream and assumed that we had taken a wrong turn somewhere. We spent the next two hours running around and trying several other alternate options. We stopped to talk to a biker, but he wasn't familiar with the course either. While we were up on a ridge, that we had decided wasn't right, Matt called his wife and she read him the route description off the website. It turns out that we were right the first time. We just had to go down stream a little bit. The first part of the trail after the stream was very overgrown. We finally made it back up to the parking area about two hours later than planned. I ran out of water towards the top and got some out of a small creek. Hopefully it was safe to drink. It was an incredible run and we saw some areas that few people ever get to see. Here is our route using Google Earth. The red is the route that we took and the yellow is the Wasatch 100 course. You can see all our detours.
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