The first time I saw Lake Hardy I was ten.  The hike is brutal, but I really wanted to make it.  Dad woke me a four-thirty in the morning and we loaded our gear into the back of his old sky-blue pickup.  This was just before Lone Peak and most of the surrounding ranges were designated a Federal Wilderness Area.  We didn’t at the time see the point, as the whole state except Salt Lake City was more or less wilderness.  Now I’m dazzled by the foresight; the Wasatch Front is on the most populous and sprawling geographies of the Mountain West.

Dad pushed the truck up the old sheep road until it killed on sheer steepness.  He left it in gear and pulled the emergency brake and just left it there, clinging to the face of First Hammengog.  He tossed me my lunch and canteen and we started the legwork: up the front of “First,” reaching the first stand of high pines and crossing the meadow at “Second.”  We hauled up the ruthless switchbacks to the spine dividing the Hammengogs from the Intake canyon, clawed up the nearly vertical apex, leveled off for an eastern traverse across the base of the granite peaks.  Then we dropped into the hanging meadow, Grassy Flat, and followed the stream and its iron-stained granite boulders up to the lake.

Lake Hardy is an irregular blue circle, about a hundred yards across.  Fractured granite cliffs rise from the north shore, and a ponderous granite stairway rises on the west.  South is the route back to Grassy Flat.  The ridge where the little Boeing crashed in 1931 is another hour or two above the lake, depending on the hiker.  Between the lake and the airplane ridge, and east-north curve, the passage is pure stone, not in smooth sheets but in huge broken pieces, big as Volkswagens, big as boxcars.

My father was a wonderful childhood dad, funny, generous, confiding.  He remained funny and generous, rampant with stories and pronouncements, but as an adult, of course, I comprehended the edges and realized how little clear access he gave to anyone.  When I was ten he simply dazzled me.  We talked and laughed and stopped to breathe and be breath-taken all the way up.  We ate sandwiches and Hershey chocolate under a hanging rock.  He shoved me up that skinny razorback ridge and told me I could make it, and so I knew I could.

My legs were shaking and I felt giddy at the summit, below Lone Peak itself but still ten and a half thousand feet above sea level.  Dad grasped my ankles while I stretched full length across a skyline boulder and hung my arms and head over the airplane cliff.  The wall dropped sheer for three hundred feet, then angled just enough for a spectacular bounce.  I imagined that if someone pushed off hard, she might clear the angled slope and take the whole drop in one shot, all eight hundred feet.  I felt my hair fly back with the updraft.

Because I have been to the lake many times since, I know that at seven or seven-thirty on a summer evening the wind ceases and the lake goes still, perfectly.  The motion settles and the lake turns into a huge silver hole, no longer water but a perfect inversion of the cliffs and sky and sparse pines above.  It looks like the entrance to a parallel world, an inside that actually corresponds with the outside, the depth revealing the surface, the release point.

Seeing the silver hole makes it easy to think you could walk right down into it.

Alpine folklore claims that Lake Hardy, a volcanic opening, has no bottom.  “Once, the Forest Service took a pack train up with spools of bailing twine,” my fifth-grade teacher, also a summer ranger at Timpanogos Cave, told us . “They went out to the middle of the lake in a rubber raft and let down the weighted twine, just keep unreeling and unreeling, tying each end to the next spool and then another, until there wasn’t any left.  So they dropped the line and went home.” 

For some reason this story made us feel important.

Souvenirs of my first hike: a piece of brittle airplane aluminum.  Image of my father, grinning, a young man, proud of me.  Invisible imprint of his grip around my ankles.