Day 107: 01 August, 21.1 miles today, 1684.9 miles total, Teton Wilderness, WY
Hitchhiking, the guide stresses, is illegal in Dubois. We’d had our thumbs out in front of the post office for less than five minutes when a pickup pulled over. “Do you know anyone named Seth?” he asked. We did not. “I was supposed to meet a guy named Seth here at 8 o’clock, but I don’t see him anywhere. Supposed to give him a ride to the trail. Oh well. Y’all might as well hop in.” We loaded our packs in the bed and climbed in the cab. After a quick, abortive attempt to find the hiker named Seth, his cause was given up for lost, and the driver was easily convinced to swing by the hotel we’d been staying in to pick up Unknown, PA, and Elf.
I had mixed feelings about the whole thing—I felt bad knowing that Seth would probably show up a few minutes late only to discover that his ride had already left town with full load of strangers, but I wasn’t about to pass up a 30 mile ride when it was so generously offered. I needn’t have worried; when our driver returned to town, he did indeed find Seth, as well as Shorty and several others who were ready to leave, and he gave all of them a ride back to the trail. It was easily a couple of hours of the man’s time and few dozen dollars in gas, but he wouldn’t hear of taking money for his kindness.
The rest of the day was fine. It was a bit of slog, returning to the trail after two blissful days off, but the terrain was gentle whenever there weren’t blowdowns to climb over or wide, swift rivers to drench our feet as we crossed. We got stuck leap-frogging a caravan of horses from a local place that gave guided backcountry horse tours. All the riders we cheerful and friendly—but of course they didn’t have to walk through the steaming stream of shit that the horse train left in its wake. We were grateful when they finally turned off the CDT and out of our lives.
It was a fairly chill day, though I was more than ready for it to end by the time I got to camp. I found Sean Meadow waiting under a tree, when I found myself in desperate need of an emergency cathole. I left her with the tent and spent several long, agonizing minutes trying to find a sheltered spot to dig. I eventually did, and everything turned out almost all right, though I’d neglected to pay particular attention to the ground I was crouching over: I spent the walk back digging burrs out of the lining of my shorts.
Day 108: 02 August, 21.8 miles today, 1706.7 miles total, Teton Wilderness, WY
One of the few ways we’d been lucky on our thru-hike of the CDT was that we’d never had to break camp in the rain. Another was that none of the hundreds of water crossings we’d had so far had been particularly treacherous or difficult. Today both of those streaks were broken.*
It wasn’t raining hard, so really all we had to contend with was a wet tent—easy enough to fix if we could find a patch of sun during lunch or some other break—and it let up almost as soon as we started hiking. And the Soda Fork River crossing was at least mercifully short, though the current was strong, the rocks along the bottom were very slippery, and the water was unbelievably cold. It took many long minutes of awkward walking before I could feel my feet again. A half hour into the hiking day and my feet were almost dry again.
After that, the day really was, as Sean Meadow would put it at lunch, “blah.” The scenery wasn’t much to look at, and the sky was overcast and gloomy. It was the second day a row of borderline crappy hiking: the terrain wasn’t terrible, but there were frequent enough blowdowns, rocks, mud puddles, and mosquitoes to keep things low-key unpleasant. But what really made the Teton Wilderness experience the literal shitshow that it was were the horses.
Horses suck, as any hiker who ever been forced to share a trail with them will tell you. Their hooves chew up the pathway, creating great gummy mudholes that eventually dry into ankle-twisting pits. When it’s dry, they kick up huge clouds of dust that make it hard to breathe. And even though humans have to bury their own waste, these entitled asses have no compunction in letting the animals that are only on the trail because they brought them there turn the footpath into an open sewer. Lucky for them, they don’t have to walk through it.
The problem only got worse in the late afternoon, when it started raining. It was still coming down when we got to camp and started setting up a tent in the rain which had never had a chance that day to be dried. By the time the tent was pitched, wiped down, and filled with our stuff, the rain had eased so that only a light sprinkle was falling from the sky. It seemed better luck than it could have been, then, that at that moment I needed to go dig a cathole. I found a good spot, got everything ready, and had only just committed myself to squatting over the hole, when the sky opened up and a truly biblical cascade of water fell from the heavens and onto me.
I came back to camp soaked and freezing. Anywhere else on trail, we’d have simply cooked dinner in the tent—since all that really meant was heating up water in the vestibule and pouring into a mug full of ramen or instant potatoes. But we were in grizzly country, so tent dinner was out of the question. In the end, we tied up our food and got into our sleeping bags without eating. If going to bed hungry was the price for getting dry and warm as soon as possible, then I was more than willing (if not happy) to pay it. But it was still quite some time before I was finally warm enough to doze off, the rain beating on the tent all the while.
*Though Elf would later say that he hadn’t thought the river crossing was that big a deal, so I guess take my risk with a grain of salt…though I’d still insist that if anybody had slipped on that crossing, they’d have been swept downstream a ways and would’ve gotten banged up pretty good as they went.
Day 109: 03 August, 19.7 miles today, 1726.4 miles total, Yellowstone NP
When we woke up, everything was wet. That wasn’t surprising, as the rain had given way in the late evening to the sort of ground fog that entered every crevice and plasters it with condensation. It was also as cold a morning as we’d encountered since leaving Colorado—colder, in fact. We knew that the day’s terrain wasn’t supposed to be very difficult, and we knew that had to do just under twenty miles to get to our first permitted campsite in the national park, so we put off the moment we would have to deal with the cold, wet world at least until the sun had risen.
We packed up our wet gear and started on our way. With fewer than six miles to the Yellowstone border, the Teton Wilderness wasn’t done making our waking lives a small-scale nightmare. Only a couple hundred feet from camp, the trail was completely overgrown with plants that reached above my head and were still dripping with moisture. The phenomenon is called a “hiker carwash,” because of the way the wet foliage acts like the spinning scrubbers you see in an drive-thru car wash. It’ll soak you to the skin faster than a downpour, and this morning we had a couple miles’ worth—often with soft mud or horseshit to navigate on the ground we couldn’t see. Though whether that was better or worse than the broad marsh some ill-intentioned beavers had built across the trail was open to debate.
It was, then, a huge relief when the trail passed the park border and started climbing away from the water. The sun came out, and after a few miles of easily rolling terrain, we came to a flat, open riverbank where we spread out all of our gear to dry while we made an early lunch—both of us preparing the dinners we had foregone the evening before.
With full bellies and dry stuff, we continued the rest of the day at an easy pace, arriving at camp after Elf and PA, but still fairly early in the evening. Unknown, who had tented the night before at the park boundary, had been in camp since around 1400hrs, and had already had an encounter with a black bear. The creature had come nosing and digging around the food-hanging area, and completely ignored Unknown as he yelled at it and threw stones in its direction and tried generally to drive it away. It was unfazed, leaving only when it decided it wasn’t going to find anything at this camp worth eating.
As we ourselves were getting ready to make dinner, we noticed that Donna was stealth-camped nearby, and we invited her to eat with us, in part to prevent her from cooking once again in her tent in grizzly country. The woman, whose trail name, it turned out, was Bullhorn—but whom we had quietly been referring to as “Bear Bait”—was as genial and good-natured as ever, but was as unfazed by Unknown’s black bear encounter as the bear had been. “Ah, so, but we are cooking now, with all of our food spread around. If a bear is not afraid of people, where is it now?” She would not be dissuaded from the idea that all bears were timid and harmless.
As it was, no hungry animal of any kind invaded our camp that night. We could only hope that Bear Bait’s luck would continue to hold up, and she would not live up to the surreptitious name we had assigned her.
Day 110: 04 August, 20.2 miles today, 1746.6 miles total, Yellowstone, NP
The day started cruise-ily enough, with six easy miles through the chilly morning air to a geothermally heated stream. It was a nice hike—even though Elf was attacked some fifty feet in front of me by a fiercely territorial falcon, which returned to its roost atop a barren tree and screeched and chittered at us until we stopped gawking at it and walked away. I’d never seen a bird of prey dive bomb a human before; it was really something else.
As was the hot stream. I assume it was just a regular stream that was being fed obscenely hot water up-current from the place where it ran next to the trail, but at that point it was perfect. Wasting no time, we all melted into the knee-deep water, the temperature of a professional hot tub. We luxuriated in the water for almost an hour, before drying in the sun while chatting to other hikers who came along. Shorty came walking out of the woods as we were getting ready to leave. He seemed a bit worse for wear, and was talking about taking a week off once he left the park. He was still having a hard time eating enough to keep up with the demands hiking placed on his body.
We reluctantly left the hot stream and started walking past deep, colorful pools of turquoise water so close Sean Meadow was burned by the steam coming off of one when she got close. We passed a crack in the earth, venting underground gas with such force we both mistook the sound for a high wind in the trees. After that, we left all geothermal wonders behind for the day, entering a healthy forest. The rest of the day was an easy walk in the woods. It wasn’t particularly exciting, maybe, but it was pretty pleasant overall—especially considering how rarely the CDT had ever been this gentle and relaxing.
We got into camp with plenty of daylight left, but were caught off guard by a sudden sun shower, thankfully after we’d gotten all the tents up. I wish I could tell you that the mosquitoes in camp were not among the worst we’d encountered thus far. I wish I could tell you they did not descend upon me em masse while I was using the camp’s open-air privy. I wish I could tell you I do not know what it is like to have a bottom covered completely in itchy welts.
Alas, that is not the world we live in.
Day 111: 05 August, 20.9 miles today, 1767.5 miles total, Yellowstone NP
As we were eager to get to the Geyser Grill in the Old Faithful Village for lunch, we planned for a start at 0530, only to find that this late in the season “first light” wouldn’t come until 0545. As nobody wanted to ford the icy stream running just outside camp in the dark, we sat around the empty, cold fire pit, bullshitting about this and that. Referring to the early-morning stream crossing he was dreading, Elf mentioned, “water that cold will make you pucker up in a hurry.” In response, Unknown started quietly singing, “why do you pucker up, buttercup?” By the time we were hiking out with just barely enough light to see, we were all singing and whistling “Build Me Up Buttercup.”
The frigid water put a quick end to any such merriment, however, as it was indeed cold enough to slam shut every sphincter in my body. Hoping to keep our shoes dry, Sean Meadow, PA, and I crossed in sandals* (and Unknown crossed without his socks to keep those dry). That part of the plan went off without a hitch, but the mosquitoes woke up while we were paused to put on our hiking footwear. I tried to move quickly, but in the end I had to slather myself in deet just to sit still long enough to get my socks on. The hiking day had begun.
The first few miles went pretty smoothly, but before long the new burgeoning sun was smothered by a layer of dull ashen clouds. Soon it began to rain, just in time to turn the sharp, downhill turn of the trail slick with mud. Once the path evened out, in turned into a long slog through a wide, open bog which I assume must have been fed by a geothermal spring as the whole field smelled like an open sewer. Every other step threatened to suck my shoe off my foot, which made the going frustrating and slow. It was a huge relief to reach the other side and walk again on solid ground.
After a few more miles, I was climbing around the one blowdown laying across the trail in Yellowstone, when I noticed an iphone laying on the ground. At first, I simply picked it up and set it prominently on the fallen tree, the way you would with a hat or a errant glove that you’d found on the trail side. I’d only walked a few paces before turning back, however: the best bet for reuniting the phone with its owner would probably be the visitor center in Old Faithful Village—at that point only six or so miles away. Beyond that, I had seen hardly anyone hiking the other direction so far that day, so there was a chance I could even catch them.
Only ten minutes later, a pair of young women came bounding up the trail toward me. We shouted our hellos at each other, and I was just about to ask them if either was missing a phone when they asked me if I’d seen one. The look of excited, astonished relief as I pulled the missing phone from my shoulder pouch was reward enough. The woman whose phone I had found asked if she could give me a “big old hug,” but didn’t press the issue when she saw me grimace at the idea (and anyway, not letting her hug a thru-hiker after four days in the woods was probably a bigger favor than returning her phone). She did insist on taking a selfie with me, telling me that I was her “Jesus for today.” Before I could figure out what on earth that meant, the two had started back then way they had come. “Do you want to run back?” one asked. “Sure!” they other replied, and off they went, joyfully screaming “hey, bear!” until their voices receded into the forest.
I’d assumed that would be the last I’d see of them, but maybe a half-hour later, I came around the corner to see the two women with four of their friends, all of them shouldering the sort of giant backpacks typical of weekenders. They became giddy as I came closer, diving themselves into two sets of three, lining either side of the trail. They raised their trekking poles so they met, tip to tip, above the trail. As I ran beneath their poles, they yelled and cheered me on. I could still hear them cheering as I rounded another corner and left them behind.
I think I had the misfortune of coming into the Geyser Grill immediately after an eruption of Old Faithful. Sean Meadow, Elf, PA, and Unknown hadn’t had to wait in much of a line, but the one I joined a few minutes after them stretched all the way into the lobby. I’d put in 16.7 miles by noon, and was ready to gnaw my own arm off by the time I had my lunch tray in my hands. Once I’d eaten and was starting to feel more like a (foul, unwashed, disgusting) human again, we took turns going to the general store to stock up on two days’ worth of provisions, while others stayed behind and grossly abused the cafeteria’s free refill policy. We eventually migrated to the porch outside, where a small crowd of other CDT hikers were congregating. We were just about to leave when a pair of SOBOs walked up, fresh off the trail. PA and Elf started chatting them up, and in the process learned about a route that would shave a day off of our walk into the town of West Yellowstone and save us from a 26-mile water carry.
It was a godsend. In order to make our permitted campsite and thus have any chance of getting to town on Monday, we were going to have to hike 12 more miles that afternoon. It’s not uncommon on a thru-hike that you have to breeze through a place you’d really like to stop and visit, and I had assumed that my first trip to Yellowstone would include only the briefest glance at its most famous attractions—but this new alternate bought us time, which allowed us to be tourists for the afternoon.
Just as we were about to walk off and see the geysers, Shorty came strolling in. He had clearly joined up with a group of younger hikers—just like we’d always jokingly said that he should. They were all acting goofy, which isn’t that remarkable in itself. Hikers tend to be weird to begin with. It was as we were leaving that we found out that the whole lot of them had taken mushrooms. More power to them, I suppose, but the mere idea of doing psychedelics around that many crowded, bustling people made me nauseated and anxious.
We spend a couple of hours checking out the geysers and the hot pools. We stood with hundreds of other onlookers as Old Faithful did its dance. It was fun just to be somewhere for once, and not be in a hurry to walk to the next place. It was like taking a small vacation from the CDT.
As we left the boardwalk, we parted ways with Unknown for the next couple of days. Our new route through the park meant we’d need to stealth camp within its boundaries, something that didn’t sit well with him. He’d stick to the redline, while Sean Meadow, PA, Elf, and I risked a hefty fine if we got caught. We’d meet him again in town. In the meantime, we’d hike a handful of miles, find a small, secluded meadow, and rest like we were still on vacation.
*I had never before carried so-called “camp shoes” before, but I was tired of both starting and ending the day with wet shoes and I found a pair of flip flops in a hiker box in Dubois that were actually big enough to fit my oversized feet.
Day 112: 06 August, 25.5 miles today, 1793.0 miles total, West Yellowstone, MT
Sean Meadow’s last day on trail started promisingly enough. The rain that had been pelting the tents off and on throughout the night stopped shortly before we got up, and though the world was damp, it wasn’t outright wet. We’d given ourselves the luxury of a 0630 start, which meant we didn’t have to eat breakfast by headlamp. Even so, we had the park seemingly to ourselves for the first couple hours of the day. As we came down from the forest in which we’d slept, we found ourselves surrounded by giant columns of steam rising off the hot pools in the morning air. The effect was haunting and surreal.
As we made our way north along a wide, comfortable bike path, we came to an overlook Unknown had advised us to be on the lookout for. The brief, easy climb rewarded us with a bird’s eye view of the Grand Prismatic Spring, a massive, azure blue pool bigger in diameter than a football field and ringed with a vibrant, rainbow-colored corona. It was the last geothermal feature we’d get a really good look at as the geyser basin gave way to a grassy plain—where we’d hoped to see some wandering bison, but in that score we were disappointed.
The tourists really came to life around the time we hit the paved road, the narrow shoulders of which would be our path for the next 20 miles. Sean Meadow and I did take a three mile detour down a road with an overlook of Firehole Falls, but we were really only there to get a break from the constant stream of cars, and I had to point insistently at the falls to convince Sean Meadow even to turn her head. We met up with Elf and PA at a big campground with potable water and a Coke machine, where we took a break. From there, it was 14 miles of asphalt to town. This was not the most scenic route out of the park—unless your thing is watching RVs and cars hurtle by you for hours at a time—but it would get us into town that day.
In fact, we were done shortly after 1600hrs—a super early day by CDT standards—and we were stuffing ourselves full of food-like substances at the West Yellowstone McDonald’s almost before we knew it. And just like that, Sean Meadow’s hike was done. She had made it almost 1,800 miles from the Mexican border to Montana, and she was ready for a burger. We’d have a couple of days with her, yet—her flight out town wasn’t for a few days, and we still had wait for Unknown, who had taken the redline the rest of the way through the park. It hadn’t sounded like a fun or interesting stretch of trail, but hopefully he was at least getting to see some bison along his way.
We lingered in the McDonald’s a little too long and got caught in a storm that grew progressively worse the entire 10-minute walk to the hotel. We arrived soaked and dripping all over the lobby floor, but at least we were done, with nothing to do with the rest of the evening but shower and rest, inside, warm and secure.
Day 113: 07 August, 0.0 miles today, 1793.0 miles total, West Yellowstone, MT
The thought occurred to me just as Elf spoke it out loud: “This town reminds me a lot of Gatlinburg.” And so it did. Crowded and noisy—filled as it was with hotels, restaurants, bars, souvenir shops, and almost nothing else—take away the National Park at its eastern border and in under two weeks the the place would look like an old-west ghost town neighboring a depleted mine.
The tourist hordes were a difficult adjustment from the solitude of the backcountry and the sparsely populated spaces of the towns through which we’d passed in Wyoming. Even when not waiting in line, or being nudged off the sidewalk by giant clumps of humanity, the bizarre way Americans behave while on vacation. “CLYDE YOU LOOK AT ME,” a rotund grandmother screamed in genuine anger at a five-year-old she’d had placed on a statue of a moose so she could take a picture of him. I sat on a nearby bench trying in vain to find a moment’s peace before working up the courage to join the line for ice cream. When she’d gotten the pose she wanted, the child was removed from the wood carving and she grabbed ahold of his hand, saying, “now wasn’t that fun?”
We had some town chores to do, but chief among them were rest and recuperation. We’d made it to Montana, but were still a very long way from the trail’s end at the Canadian border—too long to bear much consideration when there were snacks to be eaten in the meantime and old movies to watch on TV. Montana would wait for us right outside our window, for as long as we could manage to our off hiking into it.
Day 114: 08 August, 0.0 miles today, 1793.0 miles total, West Yellowstone, MT
The determining factor in how long we were staying in West Yellowstone was the flight Sean Meadow had booked for 9 August. We’d originally anticipated getting into town sometime on the 8th, but when we breezed in a couple of days ahead of schedule we saw no reason to rush back outside. Sean Meadow was leaving the trail, a fact which would affect the experience of everyone in the group—though no one’s so much as mine.
We’d been the odd ones in the trail family. We were not the only couple on the CDT, nor were we the only ones in long-term relationships within our small clique—but we were the only ones in our group to have their partner with them on trail. Having that change with hundreds of miles left to hike was going to require some adjustment.
Which isn’t to say by any means that Sean Meadow should have stuck with the CDT for my sake. A thru-hike can be rewarding and even fun, but even when it is, it is nonetheless grueling, painful, and difficult. There is absolutely no good reason to continue hiking when your heart isn’t in it. You’d only be wearing yourself down, to nobody’s benefit. So Sean Meadow was bailing out here, having made it almost 1,800 miles from the Mexican border to Montana. Clearly, she was taking the bulk of our partnership’s common sense with her, because I was continuing onward.
Not that I was a complete glutton for punishment. Our group had learned about an unpublicized but established alternate that would route us through Big Sky, MT on the way to Butte. This would bypass the section of the redline that bounced back and forth between the ID and MT border along what had been described to us by an enthusiastic 2018 CDT hiker as “400 miles of walking alongside a barbed wire fence.” It would also cut at least 200 miles from our total and give my exhausted and slow-hiking ass a genuine shot at finishing the hike before I had to return home to pack up and leave the country for work in the fall.
It took some doing to find the right maps and resources we’d need to hike the Big Sky Alt (and here Sean Meadow’s tireless research into our options was a huge help, even though she wouldn’t be walking a step of the route with us), but by the time we’d be leaving West Yellowstone we were reasonably certain we had all the information we’d need. In a way, it was kind of exciting—the sort of route-planning that had been more commonplace in the days before there was a single, official Continental Divide Trail, before smartphones and GPS were standard and thru-hikers relied on paper maps and compasses. “Hike your own hike,” one old trail saying goes; “No two people hike the same CDT,” goes another. As we planned for the Big Sky Alt, it felt like we were embracing the ethos behind those clichés in a deeper way that we had thus far.
It was also nice to be able to spend a couple full days in town with Sean Meadow before she left. Even simple days on trail can be stressful—on her last day as a hiker, we’d had rain, traffic, and 20 miles of asphalt—so it was a small blessing that we could spend these days in the relatively more relaxed environment of the series of hotel rooms we’d bounced around from one day to the next. The trail family would miss her, but she wasn’t gone just yet.
