I grew up not far from Deer Creek Canyon Open Space and remember the season it opened. I spent countless hours riding my mountain bike all over the park in high school but hadn't been back since. I spent the weekend with my parents so decided to get up early one morning and give it a run (having never hiked or run it before).

It was really nice. I found the Plymouth Creek Trail too steep to run but just about everything else was runnable. The figure eight around the top of the park was especially nice - most of it was not very steep and the trail was relatively smooth and rolling making it pretty fast.

The one downside of Deer Creek Canyon Parks is that the only available water is at the parking lot (at the bottom of the hill). The nature of the park is that looping options are all at the top of the park far from the parking lot. Thus I had to carry all my water with me - three liters and I drank it all.

This was my longest, hardest run back since taking the summer off and I did better than I felt. I managed 20.67 miles in 3hrs 39min with 5,048' of vertical gain. So I was averaging almost exactly 11 minutes per mile. Not bad.

I shot a little video of this run, not because it was really video worthy, but because I got a new camera (Canon SD1400) and I wanted to try it out. It has HD video capability so I was hoping the video quality would be much better than my old camera. The result... meh. I'm not super impressed. Granted a lot of the video was shot in low-light conditions, but it still isn't anything to write home about. It's no worse than my last camera, but not much better either. However, it is much smaller and lighter so at least it's got that going for it.