Disorganized notes on the Continental Divide Trail, part 20: the Bob

Day 136: 30 August, 19.3 miles today, 2194.7 miles total, Bob Marshall Wilderness, MT

The Bob Marshall Wilderness Area, known to most CDT thru-hikers simply as “the Bob,” is one of those famous stretches of trail that a hiker will think about and talk about and worry over and plan over for months before they actually have to walk through it. Every triple-crown trail has areas that, whether because they’re know to be particularly beautiful, or particularly difficult, or particularly remote (or, usually, some combination of the three in varying proportions), dominate the thoughts of the people hiking toward them ages before they actually get close to them. The AT has Blood Mountain, the Smoky Mountains, the White Mountains, Mahoosuch Notch, and the 100-Mile Wilderness. The PCT has the Aqueduct, the Mojave Desert, the Sierra Nevada, and the North Cascade Range. On the CDT, it’s the Gila River, the San Juan Range, the Great Divide Basin, the Wind River Range, and the Bob.

For a northbound hiker, it’s the last wilderness area through which you’ll pass—and one of the most notoriously wild at that, the Bob Marshall Wilderness reportedly being the place where authorities from Glacier NP will deposit grizzlies that have made problems of themselves further north. Wilderness areas tend to be remote, and often (but not always) see a lower standard of trail maintenance because the usage of motors of any kind is prohibited absolutely, meaning all wood must be cut by hand. Roads do not pass through them, and their growth is not managed in any way whatsoever. National Parks do a great job protecting access to the backcountry, but wilderness areas are where you find the true middle of nowhere.

And the Bob was supposed to be a good one. A bit daunting as it would also be our last 130-mile food carry, the scenery floored us even as we rode toward it from town. The Rocky Mountain Front, as the locals call it, is a surreal series of multilayered walls and pyramids, stacked one over the other over the other and running behind the rolling grassland outside of Augusta. The same scene had been at our backs as we’d rode into town the day before, but now it dominated our view as we headed into it.

Our first day in the Bob was gentle, with wide, smooth trail taking up slowly along the bottom of one valley and then another. We walked mostly through forest, after leaving a wide old burn behind, and glimpses of the surrounding peaks were mostly what we got—but they were admittedly impressive. It was exciting to be on what felt like the last big adventure of the trail. Tired as we had been, it was rejuvenating to be once again somewhere that promised to be at least as worthwhile as it was difficult. On the CDT, only a handful of places can ever hope to live up to such a promise, but we were pretty confident that the Bob would deliver.

Day 137: 31 August, 24.4 miles today, 2219.1 miles total, Bob Marshall Wilderness, MT

That delivery came promptly in the morning in the form of a feature known as “the Chinese Wall.” Though perhaps questionably phrased, the name is an homage to the Great Wall of China, a landmark the 4-mile long granite cliff face does undeniably resemble. As I climbed up a long, winding hill, I could the see bits of the Wall showing through the thinning pines. It was glowing, painted in sherbets and rusts by the rising sun. After following its length for several miles, I realized as the trail turned how slow my progress had been so far that morning. I chalked it up to being distracted by the view, but even as the path turned deep into the forest for the rest of the day, my pace did not improve.

It didn’t help that the alternate trail we popped onto after 11 miles turned out to be muddy, rocky, and severely overgrown. It seemed as if I was stumbling every few steps. But even as the tread slowly improved after a few miles, I still seemed to be crawling toward the day’s intended campsite. I took a late, short lunch, stopping otherwise only to gather water or eat a quick snack; still I only just made it to camp before sunset. I didn’t really get it: my ruined knee was actually kind of feeling better, so why couldn’t I make my legs move any faster? It was a question that had haunted me since the New Mexican bootheel, and I wasn’t likely to figure the answer out now. Still, the question ate at me. Being this slow was obnoxious; it was not knowing why that really bothered me.

Day 138: 01 September, 25.5 miles today, 2244.6 miles total, Bob Marshall Wilderness, MT

This day in the Bob began with a long, steady climb up a couple dozen switchbacks to Switchback Pass, the most uninspired name I think I’ve come across on this hike yet. Nonetheless, the early morning views were pretty much everything I had hoped for during the previous day’s long slog into camp—particularly the sight of the Chinese Wall bathed in the light of dawn some 15 miles to the south. As we worked our way down the north side of the pass, we ambled for a couple of hours through alpine meadows beneath rock faces crafty enough to still have patches of snow clinging for dear life to crevices and overhangs near their peaks.

Coming down from the meadows, the trail turned dusty and rocky and as I took one step, my foot slid out from under me. Normally I can put an easy stop to this sort of nonsense, but not this time. I instinctively dug my poles into the ground, but they did nothing to slow me as one leg continued forward, bending back the one that hadn’t slipped. My arms were bending uncomfortably so I let go of the poles and let the slide take me where it would—which was about 6 inches further down the trail. I was annoyed and bruised but largely unhurt. I would realize later that I had bent the tip of one of my trekking poles in the fall. What a weird moment.

I crossed a river where PA and Elf were seated on the far shore having lunch and joined them. After eating—while taking a few minutes to sit in the sun and drink my powdered lemonade—it occurred to me how completely my waking life had become dominated by hiking, such that even moments like this had become rare. I’d been walking for months, yes, but at some point in the last few days or weeks, it had become all I did. From the moment I’d packed up my gear, eaten breakfast, and dug a quick cat hole, I would walk for seven or eight hours, stopping only every so often to filter a liter of water before continuing on. I’d been breaking for lunch only long enough to cram a handful of calories into my mouth and filter some more water before pressing on in the afternoon, where I’d hike a further five or six hours, again stopping only to get water and maybe eat a fistful of crumbling crackers. Then I’d get to camp, pitch my tent, eat dinner, clean up, and go to bed. There were days I skipped little things like brushing my teeth because those were precious seconds I could be either walking or sleeping—besides eating, time spent doing literally anything else felt as if it had been squandered.

I don’t know what point all this has, only that it lead my thoughts as I walked all afternoon through a burn area that ended every so often in a patch of green, living forest—only to resume once again when I came out the other side. I wasn’t sure when life had become so singularly focused and driven. In the past, the breaks had always felt too short, but lately they’d be over seemingly in the time it took to sit down. It clearly wasn’t a sustainable pace; the only thing I could say for it was that at this rate, at least I wouldn’t have to sustain it for long.

Day 139: 02 September, 23.1 miles today, 2267.7 total, Helena-Lewis & Clark NF, MT

The Bob kinda sucked, was the general consensus—at least among Elf, PA, and me—but it did kind of depend on what you wanted out of a wilderness area, as Elf and I discussed while bushwhacking just to stay on the freaking trail. If solitude was what you were after, the Bob had it in spades: remote as fuck, we had seen no one but a couple of thru-hikers since leaving August. Nor were there any signs of human activity: no dirt roads, no long-distance electric wires, no signs warning of buried gas lines. If, however, you’d like some nice scenery and maybe some half-decent trail to walk, well, these things the Bob would not provide. Since last seeing the Chinese Wall, we saw nothing but dank woods with overgrown trail so thick you literally had to fight your way through it, alternating with burn areas all the way to the Bob’s northern boundary.

We were finishing up lunch—packing up all the condensation-soaked gear we’d set out to dry in the sun—when Later came splashing through the nearby stream, brandishing the felt-lined hat I’d dropped a mile back without realizing it. We’d hiked around him for weeks in southern Colorado, but had lost track of him until only recently. Our paths had crossed a couple of times, but we hadn’t spoken. As it happened, we’d just been complaining about the Bob, and invited Later to join in. “I love it here,” he said, “so much better than the Winds.” The comparison was as unexpected as it was odd, but after a pause for effect, he continued. “There are no people out here. It’s wonderful. The Winds were just so crowded I couldn’t stand it.” That was fair enough: we’d wanted views and grandeur and a hiking surface that didn’t completely suck; Later just wanted solitude.

I was trying, and failing, not to let the monotony of the tedious terrain get to me as I neared camp at the end of the day. I could hear the swell of a large stream as I got closer, and I groaned out loud as I realized I’d have to cross it. I’d spent the entire afternoon carefully rock-hopping across streams. I’d managed to keep my feet dry, but the process was slow and had long since become tiresome. I was halfway across this last stream when both my feet slipped at once, leaving me standing knee-deep in the cold, fast water. There would be no time to dry my shoes and socks; the sun was only minutes from dropping behind a nearby mountain. My shoes would be sodden and cold in the morning, and there was nothing I could do about it. I’d put all that effort into keeping my shoes dry just to soak them when I was less than a minute’s walk to camp.

But at least I’d made it out of the Bob.

Day 140: 03 September, 20.8 miles today, 2288.5 miles total, East Glacier Park Village, MT

The morning was not fun. Continuing on the Bob’s trend of alternating burn areas with overgrown foliage, the only difference between the wilderness area and the rest of the National Forest was the obvious use of chainsaws to clear most of the blowdowns in this section of trail. Otherwise, it was just another slog through creeper vines and dying late summer plants that had hardened into claw-like tendrils which whipped fiercely at my skin, tearing open the scab from my fall the other day and generally treating my legs like an ill-mannered child angry at being told to edge the yard with a weed-whacker.

And then I hit the section of trail the maintenance crew hadn’t gotten to when they wrapped up work for the season. I hadn’t thought the SOBOs we’d talked to were blowing the problem out of proportion, but I also wasn’t sure how bad it really was, as that early in the trail they’d have had nothing to compare it to. The blowdowns were not as bad as the utter clusterfuck we’d encountered in the Winds…but they were nearly so. Considering how many long miles had been cleared between the time those hapless souls had passed this way and I had, however, this area must truly have been a nightmare back in July. As it was, I only had to endure maybe 30 minutes of true suffering before I popped out onto a side trail that was mercifully free of obstacles. Shortly afterwards, I hit a road, and all that was left was to walk to town in the relentless sun and heat.

There isn’t much to East Glacier Park Village: three restaurants and a couple of small stores, a hiker hostel and a handful of hotels all booked up for the weekend. I’d most likely have struggled to resupply at the meager grocery, but KP, my hiking partner from the PCT, had sent me a package with enough food to get me to the border. I was in pretty good shape, overall. I just had to pull myself together enough to remember everything that needed doing before setting out on the final stretch of trail. We were getting close; I only had to avoid fucking anything up too badly for a few more days.