Day 126: 20 August, 26.7 miles today, 2011.2 miles total, Beaverhead-Deerlodge [sic] NF, MT
The day we walked into Whitehall, my remaining 2L water bladder failed. The first one had sprung a fatal leak after about 700 miles, and though I’d been using it sparingly ever since, I figured the second wouldn’t make it all the way to Canada. I still had two cheap 1L bladders, and I figured that along with my two 1L bottles I should be fine for the rest of the trail. So when we went to the outfitter in Butte even before getting anything in town to eat, I didn’t bother looking for another one. I’d heard the water in northern Montana was plentiful. A 4L capacity should be more than enough.
It was while we were walking the asphalt road away from the highway that we realized that we had a reliable water source coming up in three miles…and then nothing for 24 miles afterwards. We hadn’t left town planning to hike almost 27 miles starting well after 0830hrs, but we quickly realized that we didn’t have much of a choice. We wouldn’t be able to carry enough water to camp in addition to what we needed while hiking, so we would just have to make it to the next water source. In theory, 4L shouldn’t have been enough to last me 24 miles, but I was able to drink a fair amount at the 3 mile source and was lucky enough that the terrain was pretty easy and the trail was well shaded. The few moments I ended up walking under the sun were indeed unbearably hot, but for the most part the CDT was, for once, an easy walk in the woods. I made it to the water source—a pipe-fed cow trough—right around sunset with a half-liter to spare.
I had been naïve enough to believe that we were finally finished with cow water. As I ate my dinner on the one small patch of dust by the trough not completely splattered with cow shit, I reflected that this would probably never be true. If the CDT had anything to say about it, we would live and breathe cow shit until the trail’s bitter end.
Day 127: 21 August, 26.1 miles today, 2037.3 miles total, Beaverhead-Deerlodge [sic] NF, MT
The stretch of trail between Butte and Helena was decidedly uninspiring. It was all dry pine forest and open cow pasture. Not that pine forest can’t be pretty, more that this one just wasn’t. Maybe it was the mental fatigue of four months spent hiking already. Maybe it was the fact that we kept climbing thousands of feet each day without getting much of a view besides a thousand thousand living pine trees growing amidst a thousand thousand dead ones, a single scene played out through every minute of the day. Maybe it was the endless string of blowdowns across the trail, none of them so bad as anything we’d had to endure in the San Juans or the Winds, but obstructive enough to be a pain in the ass and prevent you from building or maintaining any momentum. The chipmunks are squirrels were frantic gray and brown blurs of spastic activity all day—I could only assume that they, too, felt the oppressive boringness of this forest and were doing what they could to spice things up.
In the mid-afternoon, I was surprised to see Unknown taking a break on a log, as I’d assumed he was by that time miles ahead of me. After explaining that he’d gotten lost at an unmarked junction and had gone done a steep mountainside he’d then had to climb grumpily back up, he mentioned that the pond coming up in half a mile would the last water source we’d come to that day. Lulled into complacency by a series of streams in the morning, I had assumed (ridiculously, stupidly) there would be water closer to camp, and I would probably have blown past it without Unknown’s intervention.
It turned out to be less of a pond, however, and more of large puddle, filled with frogs and burgeoning tadpoles and surrounded on all sides by thick, cement-colored mud and huge piles of elk shit. The water, as I collected it with a scoop I used to fill my two bladders, was the pale yellow of healthy human urine, and it was with great difficultly that I managed for the most part to keep clumps of grass and other debris out of my container. Still, it filtered easily and tasted fine, making it a substantial improvement over most of the cow water we’d had to live through in New Mexico.
Aside from the pond sewage water and the antics of the varmints, I had very little to distract from the uncomfortable fact that my pack was no longer sitting properly on my torso. My hip belt was now cinched as tight as it would go, and yet the bulk of the weight was on my shoulders. While I still wouldn’t exactly have labeled myself “skinny,” I had become too thin for for this hip belt—my second one of the trail, after I had shrunk too much to wear the first one. With less than 400 miles left to go there was little point in ordering a new one, as it wouldn’t arrive until after I was done hiking. But the ache in my shoulders was not helping my day-to-day quality of life, especially as these dry mountains continued to demand long water carries.
We’d reached the stage of a thru-hike where you start to give up on fixing problems, trying instead to live with them for the last few hundred miles of trail. It’s a kind of bitter apathy, a quasi-nihilism in which the final goal is the only thing that matters. We would finish the trail: all other concerns would simply have to be endured in the meantime.
Day 128: 22 August, 16.7 miles today, 2054.0 miles total, Helena, MT
The hiking continued to be tiring while remaining largely unremarkable. There was one summit on which the deadfallen pines allowed for a pleasant view of the surrounding mountains, but then it was right back to clambering over blowdowns without anything more interesting to look at than the next dead tree. It was the third day in a row to feature a midday storm that built overhead and threatened to overtake me without actually doing so, loud whip-cracking thunder spurring me onwards until I found myself trudging bemused in blazing hot sunshine. The thunder was gone, muffled by the last ridge I’d gone over, and now I was soaked through in sweat as if no cloud had come within a thousand miles of these hills in years.
I was exhausted, hiking into the early afternoon before getting to the highway leading to Helena. As I was getting my trusty hitchin’ thumb ready, a car pulled up from Helena, and a familiar, smiling German face appeared in the backseat window. “Hey!” called Jumpsuit in his thick and excitable accent, “do you want a ride to town?” He and his wife and their friend were being dropped off by a kind stranger who had seen them hitching and make the drive out to the trailhead just to drop them off. She was heading right back to town, and was willing to take me along.
Full (and even full-ish) hiking days that end in town are not relaxing. You’re usually wiped out by the time you hit the city limits, and then you have to hustle to get all your chores done. I was out of it, that by the time we were out to dinner and my food arrived, I had already taken a bite of sushi when Unknown spoke up. “Uhh…” he said, “those are my chopsticks.” Without realizing it, I’d stolen the utensils he’d already been using and proceeded to start eating with them. I looked down my hand with no memory even of picking them up. I was utterly nonplussed, but at least Unknown took the theft with good humor, accepting my untouched pair of chopsticks in exchange. Soon—but maybe not soon enough—I would sleep in bed, hoping against all reason to awake in morning refreshed and reborn as if the past four months had been nothing more than a particularly tiring dream.
Day 129: 23 August, 21.3 miles today, 2075.3 miles total, Helena NF, MT
We made a point of getting breakfast in town, as a real morning meal does really make a difference in how you feel that first day out of town—even if it does little to increase your pace. The meal was fine, though honestly the best thing about the restaurant we went to was that it was a five minute walk from the hotel.
Once we were back on trail, conditions were much the same as they had been during the previous few days, though the scenery was slowly growing more open and the views were slowly getting better. The terrain was variable but generally made for relatively easy walking, and Elf and I made decent progress even with a relatively late start to the day—though we lost PA and Unknown quickly, and by the end of the day we’re still nearly 4 miles behind them.
I spent much of the afternoon trying to outhike a storm, the sheet of rain and continuously rolling thunder always a little closer every time I looked over my shoulder. This chase went on for almost two hours, but I was eventually caught just as the trail opened up into an expanse of broad, rolling meadows. I got my rain jacket on just as the first cold drops were starting to fall, and for a while it was just your average walk in the gray, chilly rain. Eventually, however, the sun came out, as the rain continued to fall, and the gentle uphill climb I was on became unbearably humid, like using an elliptical machine in a steam room. It wasn’t terribly long before the shower finally passed, however, and in the sunlight everything dried in pretty short order.
Passing storms would be common in the next few days, if the forecast was any indication. In fact, after making camp in dry conditions, I lay in my tent with the vestibule open so I could watch lighting playing across the clouds in the distance. It wasn’t long before I was scrambling to close my tent up as the first few drops began falling overhead. I could hope to be lucky enough that everything would be dry (ish) when I woke in the morning to cram everything back into my pack.
Day 130: 24 August, 24.1 miles today, 2099.4 miles total, Helena NF, MT
I wanted to believe I was still dreaming, but when my alarm went off and I opened my eyes, there really was lightning flashing near-continuously above the roof of my tent. The strobe-light effect was not one to encourage a groggy hiker to leave his sleeping bag, but it eventually occurred to me that thunder and lightning often come with rain, and I’d probably be much happier packing up my tent while it was still actually dry. 30 minutes later, as I was finishing up my breakfast in the dense, chilly fog, the rain did indeed start to fall. I could tell from Elf’s cursing 100’ away that he had waited until the last moment to pack his tent away, and was now regretting that choice.
To say that the day was gloomy would be an understatement: the entire morning was downright spooky. Sometimes, we could see as far as a couple hundred feet ahead, but more often the mist and drizzle were so dense we couldn’t see more than 40’ or 50’ past the hoods of our rain jackets. It was a day full of steep climbs and exposed ridges—full of the promise of stellar views, except for the fact that all we could see beyond the trail at our feet was a solid wall of white nothing with no bottom and no end.
We stopped for lunch after coming down from yet another peak with sweeping views of the void, and the weather cleared, almost all at once. By the time we got back on our feet, the day had become sunny and warm, with occasional patches of fluffy, non existential-dread-inducing clouds. Such was the environment when we reached High Divide Outfitters, a thru-hiker’s paradise located in the absolute middle of nowhere.* Run out of a small house tucked away on a steep hill, the shop was crammed floor to ceiling and wall to wall with the sort of niche gear thru-hikers rely on, but can rarely find in more generalized outfitters. I was genuinely disappointed that I didn’t need anything, but was still happy to pick up some chips, candy, and soda.
We were finishing up dinner and trying to figure out how much farther we should try to get that day when the proprietor came out to report the weather forecast for the evening. With the knowledge that severe storms were likely overnight, Elf and I opted for shelter over mileage, stopping at a grove of healthy young pines in a spot protected by a mountain from the winds that had been rising ever since we left the outfitters. We could have pressed on for another couple of miles, but knew it was unlikely we’d come across a spot this ideal. It took a few minutes to find flat spaces to pitch our tents, but once we did we wasted no time settling in. I found myself bundling up, even though it wasn’t very cold, and I fell asleep almost the instant I lay down. I assumed at the time that it was just because we’d had a hard, chilly day with a ton of climbing—though I would eventually come realize something else was at work.
*and apparently about a 20-minute drive from the site of Ted Kaczynski’s cabin, long since demolished in the wake of his arrest and imprisonment
Day 131: 25 August, 23.0 miles today, 2122.4 miles total, Lincoln, MT
The only thing of which I aware when I first woke up in the morning was that I was dry and warm and comfortable. As I started to become aware of my surroundings, however, I began to realize that that was true of nothing else in my tent. The walls and floor were soaked—though how water could have gotten in through the floor was beyond me. The foot of my sleeping bag was wet through, and the underside of my sleep pad was dripping. I shook my gear out as best I could, but by the time I’d packed everything up, the added moisture made my pack noticeably heavier. After a cloudy but otherwise apparently easily forgettable morning of ups and downs, the sun came out. And though it was earlier than I had planned for a lunch stop, when I came to an open knoll slowly baking in the sun, I figured that I best take advantage of any chance I’d been given, and I emptied my pack, spreading all my earthly belongings out under the sun.
I spent an hour in that cozy little spot, eating most of what was left in my food bag and sipping on the soda I’d packed out of the outfitters the day before. Most things were completely dry when I repacked them, though a couple of items were still damp at the edges. It could have been my imagination, but I’d have sworn my pack felt much lighter when I pulled it back on, having just evaporated several pounds of water from my gear.
The afternoon was open and very pretty, the scenery reminiscent of the CDT in Colorado just beyond the San Juans. I was really enjoying myself for the first time in a while, until I hit the long, steep descent down to the highway. By the time those two endless miles were finally behind me, I was worn out, ready to be in town, but still with the task of getting a ride ahead of me—and with the threat of approaching weather being voiced by the rumbling thunder coming from clouds hovering over the ridge I’d just climbed down. In reality, I probably didn’t stand with my thumb out for longer than ten minutes, but I hate this process, and every second spent on the roadside when you’re already exhausted from a day of hiking feels like an eternity. In the end, I got picked up by a pair of engaged country kids, a couple from rural Montana who happily spent the ride chatting about hiking and hunting, steaks and beer.
I’d felt fine—if tired—the entire way to the motel, but everything went straight to hell almost the moment I got out of the car. It took me all of two minutes to find the room I’d be sharing with Unknown, but by the time I walked through the door my head was pounding and I was shivering uncontrollably. I tried to carry my end of the conversation as I settled in, but I don’t actually remember most of it. Within minutes, I was passed out in the bed, still shivering under a pile of coarse motel blankets. After an hour or so, Unknown woke me to ask if I wanted to go get dinner. I was hungry, so I decided to try, but found myself far too dizzy to stand. Back to bed for me. Unknown did bring me back a burger, which I forced myself to eat when I got up a few hours later to drink a glass of water and take ibuprofen. All told, I slept for 12 hours, alternating all night between shivering and sweating. Whatever was wrong with me was definitely for real; I could only hope that with a day of rest, it would pass.
Day 132: 26 August, 0.0 miles today, 2122.4 miles total, Lincoln, MT
Though it would be an exaggeration to say that I felt “good” in the morning, I definitely felt a great deal better—no thanks to the motel’s cardboard-stiff linens, of which I only became dimly aware toward morning. I had sweated through one shirt, but seemed to have a reached a fragile sort of equilibrium afterwards and slept peacefully under the semi-flexible hotel blankets.
The day was devoted to eating a large, aggressively mediocre breakfast from the same place that had birthed the late-night burger I had only a vague memory of eating, going back to the motel to rest, buying resupply for the 2.5 days hike to Augusta, going back to the motel to rest, going out for dinner at a steakhouse which specialized in cooking meat to the degree that every other item on the menu was cheap, slapdash, and poorly made*, and going back to the hotel to rest. It was too early to say I was actually recovering, and by the time dinner rolled around I was definitely backsliding somewhat into headache/fatigue/fever territory. But still I had reason to hope that I was on the mend from whatever this happened to be. We’d just have to see what kind of shape a full day of hiking would leave me in.
*but good lord, the steak was fantastic
Day 133: 27 August, 18.3 miles today, 2140.7 miles total, Scapegoat Wilderness, MT
Throughout much of my life, I have long had an entrenched reputation as a pessimist, though I personally think it’s overstated if not totally inaccurate. I frequently wish for the best, or even assume it to be the most likely outcome. The real issue, I think, begins with the frustration and bitterness that arise when my optimism—well-founded or otherwise—proves to be mistaken.
The belief that the worst days of the trail were behind us, based more on hope than fact, was shattered as we left Lincoln and climbed into the mountains north of Rogers Pass. We already knew it was going to be the most consistently steep day of the hike so far, with over 6,000’ of climbing and over 4,000’ of decent in fewer than 19 miles. It was always going to be a hard day, and we all knew it. What none of anticipated—or had even bothered to look up in the local area forecast—was the wind.
We had had days and weeks and even months of terrible wind in New Mexico, Colorado, and well into Wyoming, but we actually been blessed not to have had anything too serious to cope with since we’d left the basin. We’d been lulled to sleep, which made the awakening forced upon us by the most ferocious wind we’d yet encountered all the more rude. I didn’t have the means to measure its speed, though the next time I felt anything like it I was riding in a pickup with the windows down, bombing down a country road at 60mph—suffice it to say that anytime a careless ridgeline put us in direct contact with this wind, it was difficult to keep my balance. Judging from the way I saw Elf up ahead continually stumble only to catch himself with his trekking poles, I wasn’t the only one. I had to used my buff to keep my hat from flying off, and any and all loose straps ends on my pack whipped me painfully in the face over and over again. As we now had to fight simply to remain upright, the wind had come along to make a very hard day much, much harder. It was difficult not to attribute at least some degree of malice to CDT.
The wind was also cold, chilling me in a way I was fairly confident would exacerbate the illness I had only just (hopefully) gotten through the worse of. In fact, I could feel it lurking in my muscles as I stood up from a lunch break taken in the lee of a small tree and marched back into the howling gale, which roared in my ears with all the intensity and noise of a jet engine. The wan sun shining through a thin layer of clouds was no match for the frigid gale. I eventually had to stop during yet another long, steep climb to add a layer.
It wasn’t until we dropped into a shallow valley that we found any shelter from the wind. By that time, only an hour or so of daylight remained, and I was immensely relieved to come upon PA cheerfully pitching his tent and explaining the long route to find water. My legs hurt in ways the trail had never inflicted on them before, and I was just grateful not to have to push on into god knows what awful climb just to find myself back in the wind. We’d been forced, once again, to embrace the brutality of the CDT, as I could see now we most likely would until the bitter, nasty end. But we’d survived another terrible day, and could retreat to our tents, to bundle up against the shockingly cold night, after spending two nights sweltering in town. We still had 250 miles to go; no doubt we’d still find our limits test for a great many of them.
Day 134: 28 August, 24.5 miles today, 2165.2 miles total, Scapegoat Wilderness, MT
The trail was breaking me. There are probably no circumstances in which this fact would have seemed fair to me, but it felt especially unnecessary to saddle the CDT’s slowest hiker with more impediments to moving quickly or even well.
The extreme fatigue and chills from whatever sickness I’d had hadn’t returned after leaving Lincoln—though I still woke every morning with a stabbing headache—so that handicap seemed to have more or less cleared up without much in the way of intervention. I was still tired all the time…but I was also still hiking 12 to 14 hours every day. Sleeping for 7 hours does not make up for it, no matter how sincere you are about it.
My feet had started occasionally tingling—something I could remember Sean Meadow discussing with PA happening to them on the PCT. It had never happened to me before, and was kind of alarming for pretty much only that reason. However, it didn’t do anything to slow me down or wrong-foot me, so I didn’t really care about it.
I had started feeling a twinge in my right knee somewhere shortly after mile 100, so I’d been wearing a support of one kind or another pretty much ever since. I’d skipped a day here or there, but if I was on trail, generally I was keeping that knee protected—not because it was particularly bad, but because I wanted to prevent it from becoming so. And then, sometime after lunch, my other knee decided to call it quits.
It happened fairly suddenly, but without any obvious provocation—though I assumed the previous day’s obscene elevation gain, combined with having to keep upright in gale-force winds, had had something to do with it. My muscles were still tight and sore from the day before, but that was easy enough to ignore. It was when using my left knee like a knee suddenly started feeling like a brick was twisting around inside of it that my typically slow pace dropped.
I had one knee support. I resisted moving it from what had once been my bad knee* to what had once been my good knee,** but after a mile or so of basically limping through the woods without any improvement, I went ahead and made the switch. I’m pretty sure it helped, but it was still after sunset when I came staggering into the camp Elf had set up in a thin stand of dead trees. “I’m pretty sure if any of these fall, they’ll fall away from us,” he said. It was more than good enough for me. I was completely done in. I hadn’t even stopped for dinner, but had taken so long that Elf had started to grow concerned that something serious might have happened.
“Nope,” I explained as I started setting my up my tent in the gathering dusk, “I’m just falling apart, is all.”
*now my less shitty knee
**now my shittier knee
Day 135: 29 August, 10.2 miles today, 2175.4 miles total, Augusta, MT
Everyone was ready to be done. With just over two hundred miles between us and the border, finishing the trail and stepping into life beyond hiking, sleeping on the ground, and living out of a pack was on the forefront of everyone’s mind. I’d already had a variation of the same conversation with a Unknown and Elf when PA surprised me by coming up from behind. “Hey!” I greeted him. I’d been chugging happily along the fairly smooth trail, only barely bothering my “bad” knee and only occasionally wrenching a shooting pain from my “ruined” knee.
“Where did you come from?” I asked. I’d assumed everyone else was ahead of me. “Oh, I slept in a little bit. Camped by the junction a few miles back, so I figured I didn’t need to get up as early.” “I knew you guys camped there, but I didn’t see your tent.” “We were behind the trees, so you wouldn’t have seen it unless you went off trail over there.” “Oh, gotcha.” There was a slight pause. “God, I can’t wait for this hike to be over,” he said. It was a beautiful morning. A short, easy day, spent walking along a river at the bottom of a beautiful valley. And every one of us was totally over it.
Well, maybe not completely. There were still moments when I was glad to be where I was. Northern Montana had slowly taken shape over the last week or so, and when I did notice it I had to admit it was pretty stunning. That ambivalence was also common. Leaving the hotel after finishing some chores, we met three hikers we’d (or at least I’d) never seen before. One of them said, “I just wanted so bad not to walk anymore. Just to be done.” He paused, as if considering, then concluded, “but now I think I’m okay again.” How to explain to this tired young man that neither feeling is permanent, but rather two sides of a coin that won’t even stop spinning once the hike is over?
I was suffering my way through most days, passing the time by thinking anxiously of the end of the journey. But I was still glad to be there, glad to have stuck it out all these months. We had come at last to the Bob Marshall Wilderness, the last section before we’d enter Glacier NP and make for the border. We were tired. We were hurt. We wanted desperately to be done. We were so tantalizingly close to the end of the trail, but we’d still need to walk through two of Montana’s prize jewels to get there.
Stay safe !! You are almost done, what an accomplishment
You got this Al! Triple Crown is within strides.
You’re doing great. Enjoy Glacier NP!