The Grand Enchantment Trail and the End of the Hike

When Rachel and I got back to Chama, NM, where we flipped to Glacier National Park 4 months earlier, we knew we didn't want to keep hiking on the CDT in New Mexico.  The trail south of where we started the CDT in Grants, NM has a lot of paved road walking, is generally flat and has only a few highlights.  The trail also splits at one point, one direction takes you further east to the Black Range and the much more popular western route through the middle fork of the Gila River canyons.  The Gila route has more water (arguably too much water since you cross the river over a hundred times), canyon walls and some cliff dwellings and is shorter.    At the same time, we didn't feel like the hiking year was over yet so we decided to try and bag the Grand Enchantment Trail (GET) which happens to go through both the Black Range and the west fork of the Gila River while avoiding paved road walks and hitting more of the Southwest's sky islands, short high elevation mountain ranges that poke up out of the desert.  The GET also has more cross country sections, which I find more interesting than trail. However, we'd be starting October 14th, at least two weeks later than a typical westbound GET start date.

The GET would also give Rachel a chance at planning a long distance hike since I had already done most of the planning for the years hiking up until then.  I took care of acquiring the maps and she worked on the resupply plan and itinerary.  We figured we would have just enough time to hike from the eastern GET terminus at Sandia Mountain in Albuquerque to where the GET joins the AZT near Superior, AZ, about 130 miles from its finish and still get home for thanksgiving but it was looking tight.  We figured we would go for it and get done what we could, but a full through hike wouldn't be possible since we would probably miss the western most 30 miles of the GET.  Special thanks to Matt and Yogi who printed the maps on short notice and mailed them to us in Albuquerque all for free since I contributed in the 2015 PCT guidebook.

Brett "Blisterfree" Tucker created the GET and has an excellent website that makes the planning process easy, although there's almost too much information.  He's also very responsive to questions so feel free to contact him if you're interested in the route.

We started the trail out by taking the gondola ride up to the top of Sandia Peak, saving us most of a day and a 4,000 foot climb.  We had to pick up my new sleeping pad from REI which cost a lot of time and only got to the top of the mountain late in the day.  Since it was October, the sun was setting before 7 pm and rising around 6:30 am so we were starting to really feel the lack of daylight.  We got a few miles in, found a nice spot and dry camped.  From there the trail traversed the crest of the Sandia Mountains and dropped us off at a trailhead just up route from an unlisted on-trail Subway restaurant!  A gondola ride up to the top of a 10,000+ foot tall mountain AND lunch on trail? This was certainly no CDT!

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Man that gondola ride was tough!

The Sandia Crest

After the Sandia mountains there is an option to skirt some very remote private land or hike a 27 mile roadwalk, which no one does.  That really hit home that we weren't on a national scenic trail anymore, just a route some guy thinks is cool (and it is). After that the GET climbed up to our second sky island - the rugged Manzano Range.  The trail seemed to get little use and was easy to lose at first but got more distinct as we continued.  We got a good feel for the route in this section as Brett mixed road walks, trail and short cross country sections to keep you moving to the next highlight.

Rachel in the Manzano's

Desert views from the Manzano's

That's the trail!

We hit our first hitching road to Mountainair, NM, a tiny arts and ranching community near ABQ.  The night before we camped a few miles from the road at dark and planned on catching an early ride into town.  Just as we were waking up a storm hit that dropped an insane amount of rain, flooding the ground our tent was pitched over and getting everything muddy.  You tend to get kind of lazy about campsite selection in the desert since it rarely rains.  This time we really got burned! This storm started a pattern since the next five weeks we'd see six more just like it, even though November is typically New Mexico's driest month.

From Mountainair we hiked our way into Magdelena, NM.  The section was mostly jeep trails with connecting cross country segments.  A lot of the cross country is following a (normally) dry wash, but our second storm hit several days in and we had to either avoid the washes with roads or cross them while they were flooded.  One wash in particular was looking very fast and deep so we waited almost an hour for it to recede.  That was a good plan until another storm cell approached and we decided to just go for it before that cell raised the water back up!  This was probably the worst crossing of the whole year - waist deep, fast and muddy so you can't see the bottom.  Rachel and I crossed facing together, arm in arm, walking sideways.  That way my legs could break a little of the current for her and we could use each other for stability.  It was a little more intense than we were expecting for New Mexico in fall.

An easy crossing!

Wall of water and rainbows!

Towards the end of the segment we had the option of fording the Rio Grande, whose headwaters we drank from in Colorado a month earlier, or taking a long dirt road walk to a bridge.  We played it safe and took the bridge since the river would probably be in flood stage.  The next storm hit a day later and we got treated to half a dozen rainbows, including three at one time!

The last few days on that stretch we started seeing several sets of boot prints on some of the cross country.  We unexpectedly found their owners ten miles before town - a trio of german hikers with big packs and big leather boots to match!  They were aghast at our lightweight packs and trail runners and we hung out a bit in town and camped together the next night.  They were out for a few weeks and had just started after the Rio Grande crossing.  Unfortunately one of them hurt her ankle in the weeks leading up to the trip and it hadn't healed.  She wasn't able to go very far so they decided to modify their trip and hitch to the Gila hot springs area.  They were amazed when the woman at the post office gave them the number of a woman in Silver City who would host and drive them around. I guess that's unusual in Germany!

The trail after Magdalena climbs up to South Badly at 10,783 feet and past an observatory.  There's a nice trail down to a road but the trailhead is on private hunting land. Apparently the owners decided they don't want people crossing their land so we had to do a slow and circuitous bushwack around it.  It was steep and rough, full of thorns and especially frustrating when you could be cruising down a trail and dirt road.

Our next highlight was Potato Canyon - a really cool riparian area with lots of water and steep canyon walls.  The trail in the canyon was tricky to follow until we climbed up out of the canyon to the base of Mount Withington. Then we had a pleasant roadwalk with occasional views of the desert floor below and our next mountain range - the San Mateo's.

The GET used to follow the San Mateo Range south, then go through Monticello Canyon - supposedly a beautiful riparian corridor ending in a magnificent box canyon.  Unfortunately a new landowner has closed one section of the canyon, requiring an alternate around it.  Brett has one listed but he never actually hiked it, so it turns out we were the guinea pigs.

We first shortened the route by taking a side trail down San Mateo canyon rather than continuing south along the ridge, then heading north to the alternate.  The trail in the canyon was difficult to follow but you're in a canyon, so you'll find it eventually.  There were a lot of blow downs for several miles too, which is annoying.  The nice part was the perennial stream in the canyon that would mean east bounders climbing up wouldn't have to carry water until the switchbacks that lead up to the ridge.

We connected to Brett's reroute on a steep descent into Kelly Canyon then following up a side canyon.  We were a little surprised by a 6 or 7 foot pour off - a low cliff - at the very start of the side canyon but scrambled up to the right of it pretty easily.  Then another pour off and some scrambling up slabs.  It was tricky to figure out which branch of the canyon to stay in, so we climbed up out of it for a minute to get a better view, then down back into the main side canyon.   Staying right worked up until the top and we made it out just before dark.  We then had some dirt road walks past dry or gross water sources until hitting some newly installed solar wells.

We reached the road to Winston - a tiny ranching community we sent a box to 20 miles away - around lunchtime and hoped for a ride within a few hours.  It was looking grim with only three trucks going the wrong way by 2 pm and another storm system moving rapidly towards us when a truck pulled over.  The woman driving asked if we wanted to get inside somewhere for the storm, even though she lived three miles in the wrong way.  We said sure and suddenly found ourselves being spoiled by the wife and friend of a local hunting guide!  They were just finishing up the season and had lots of extra food to get rid of - a hikers fantasy!

Annika asked if we had been in San Mateo canyon the day before; apparently two hikers had spooked a big elk her husband and client were stalking - oops!  Later that day the guide came home, he was packing out the elk that didn't run when we walked by, and wasn't too happy about us being there initially but quickly warmed up.  I think people who spend a lot of time in the outdoors have a deep connection that makes itself apparent, whether or not you do entirely different things.  Their family has lived in the area for five generations and they were more concerned with protecting it than the average Subaru driving environmentalist.  Anyhow, Annika and her husband hosted us that night and had a friend pick up our boxes from Winston.  We showered, did laundry, which we couldn't do in Magdelena so things were getting nasty, and ate a ton of great food.  They even sent us packing with a pound of elk sausage!

The next stretch actually took us back onto the official CDT in the Black Range.  It was pretty mellow for a mountain range and full of burn.  At one point we couldn't find a campsite until almost 9 pm because the burned plants grew back in too thick and the trail traversed a steep ridge for miles and miles.  Usually you can pick saddles or flat spots out from your topographic map but everything was covered in new growth.  We ended up camping on top of Diamond Peak, over 10,000 feet again!

The next few days we spent on a horse trail that follows Diamond creek.  The creek meanders overtime between low canyon walls which means the trail has to cross them since you can't just climb the canyon wall.  That's fine if you're on a horse but crossing a freezing cold creek when there's still frost on the ground at noon is a new kind of suffering!  The canyons don't get much sunlight and cold air sinks into them at night. Rachel has raynaud's so her feet really really hurt to the point where she had trouble walking.

We walked into the Gila Hot Springs area and got a ride to Doc Campels post - a tiny general store run by an ornery old man.   Turns out the box I had prepared from the CDT was the second part of a two box resupply and had almost no food in it.  Rachel bummed me some and we figured we'd resupply again at the tiny town of Alma which has just a convenience store.  Another storm blew in that night and dropped snow above about 6,000 feet.  We decided to give it a day and let things melt so we forked over more money than normal for a room across the street from Docs.  Bonus: heated floors!

The Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument didn't open until 10 am the next day and it took us a while to get there without a car.  We ended up staying for the 11 am tour and not hitting the trail until after noon.  Of course the trail crosses the west fork of the Gila River about seventy times over the next seventeen miles.  The crossings got progressively deeper after we passed the option to hike out of the canyon on a series of longer but parallel trails.  We should have gone back but I was kind of stubborn and though the canyon was cool.   Rachel was freezing!  We camped only eight miles or so in and still had at least half the crossings left.  The night was clear so we made a fire to dry out our pants and shoes so they didn't freeze overnight.  You can't really dry out shoes completely so we still had to warm them up on the stove the next morning.

The next morning we tried to climb out of the canyon but got cliffed out and had to turn around.  We were going to wait until it warmed up to start "hiking" (swimming?) anyway so we didn't lose too much time but it was sketchy going back down.  We finally made it out of the canyon and up to a decent campsite around dusk.  Another fire, although the wood was kind of wet and our shoes were only partially frozen the next morning.

Brrr!

Some cliff dwellings a few miles from the national monument site.

The next part of the trail was burned for a few miles, covered in blow downs and thorns and I misread the map and thought it would stay like that all day.  We almost turned around!  Fortunately the burn was better after a few miles and we spotted a Mexican gray wolf!  They were reintroduced in the area but are still very rare.  In 3,000 miles this was our first wolf sighting!

We hit some snow on Mogollon Baldy but just a few inches deep, enough to see mountain lion, bear, wolf, elk, deer and rabbit prints all over the trail but no footprints! The views were really fantastic but we had to night hike to make it to a snow-free campsite at the trailhead.  Sleeping on snow with summer weight sleeping pads is a great way to spend a freezing cold night out and all the flat spots between had a few inches of crust.

The next day was an easy roadwalk down off the mountain and then into yet another canyon filled with creek crossings! At least this one ended in a riparian slot canyon near Alma!

From Alma we hiked through some lower but very rugged mountains into Arizona and eventually to the mining town of Morenci.  Initially we were excited since the motel, grocery store, post office and all you can eat pizza are within spitting distance of each other.  Sadly, the motel was full of mining contractors and we had to call up the motel in Clifton for a ride and a very expensive room.

I think at this point we were getting pretty frustrated with the weather, the fords and the towns.  The hike into Safford was pretty nice, mostly on the Safford-Morenci trail, a rugged historical trail between the two mining towns.  The way out of safford we hit yet another storm that dropped snow on the last high elevation part of the trail - Mount Graham.  At this point we were scheduled to get to Phoenix a day or two ahead of my flight out on Monday, were sick of the weather and tired from 8 months of hiking.  We decided to throw in the towel a days walk out of Safford.  So we walked and then hitched back to town, pigged out and rented a car in Globe to drive around Arizona for a few days.  We went up to Sedona for a night, which was nice but no Zion, check out some hieroglyphs and did some roadside camping.  Mostly it was just nice not to be walking, cold and wet and dependent on hitch hiking for the first time in eight months.

I think this was a much easier transition than trying to finish the GET, and now I have a week+ long backpacking trip I can do sometime in the future.

Overall the GET is a fantastic route.  Every day is both scenic and totally different from the last.

Photo's are here!

CDT Colorado!

The skip to Battle Pass went mostly without a hitch, expect we bailed from the Winds a little earlier than planned and ended up hitching to Lander. We only missed Temple Pass, but no big deal.  Rachel had been feeling sick to her stomach and was lagging most of the time, I figured it was just exhaustion.

We ended up spending a zero day in Lander with a thru-hiker friend we met on the Arizona Trail, Pod, who let us stay at her rented house and showed us around town.  Lander is pretty sweet, it isn't as touristy as Pinedale and is still fairly close to the Winds.  We met up with K2 and Ridgerunner and the 3 hour drive to Battle Pass saved us about 200 miles of really boring dirt roadwalks and cow water.

We managed to keep up with K2 and Ridgerunner for a few days but they eventually blew past us when I forgot Rachels In-Reach at camp just below Lost Ranger Peak.  So, it was back to just Rachel and I and we hiked through the beautiful Zirkel Wilderness and to Rabbit Ears Pass.  On the way to the Pass I talked to two women walking four big dogs.  They immediately offered to give us a ride into Steamboat Springs, our first Colorado town!  One of them even offered their extra backpacking food from completing the Colorado Trail just a few weeks earlier.  When we got there she pulled out one huge bin of backpackers pantry type meals, fancy bars and home made oatmeal packages, then a second bin, then a giant box!  They could have hiked the trail twice with that much food!  We basically resupplied for free, then spent the night at their house.  It was awesome!

The next 600 miles have been the most scenic of the CDT by far.  Colorado has been tough, lots of high altitude ridge walking up and down 12,000 and 13,000 foot tall peaks while looking down at entire hillsides covered in golden aspens.  We stuck to the official route over Grays Peak, the highest point on the continental divide at 14,278 feet, bagging neighboring Torrey's Peak as well.  The trail continued for a knife edge that scared the beejesus out of Rachel.  We had a tough time with the altitude and eventually figured out Rachel had contracted Giardia.  She tried to get tested in Leadville but the nurses dismissed it as a possibility since she didn't have any diarrhea.  I gave her my course of Flagyl antibiotics from the PCT and she immediately improved.  We bagged San Luis Peak, our third fourteener and just finished the northern San Juan mountains.  Today we finally took two days off to wait out some bad weather and will finish the last 70 miles of Colorado in three more days - meeting up with Cumbres Pass, where we flipped up to Glacier from last June.

A moose just outside Rocky Mountain National Park

James Peak!

Rachel on the Knives Edge between Grays Peak and Mt. Edwards

From there the plan is to hike the Grand Enchantment Trail from Albuquerque back to Arizona near Phoenix.  It overlaps about 100 miles with the Arizona Trail which we already hiked this year so we should be home for Thanksgiving!

Colorado Photos are here!

CDT - Wyoming and Tapon's Teton Route

Southern Montana and the Idaho border seemed to drag forever so we ended up taking our first shortcut - the Mack's Inn alternate.  It would cut out one of the many U shaped swirls the continental divide takes, saving us over 30 miles and getting us to Yellowstone over a day faster than the official trail.  Unfortunately, the route started by way of a bushwack through a beaver pond...

Naturally, the way I decided to go was the wrong way and we ended up spending way too much time in thigh deep icey water covering ankle deep muck.  We made it out of the pond after what seemed like forever and followed a stream up to its source on the divide - the most remote source of the Missouri River.  There was even a giant cairn and geocache near the divide with a 12 page laminated article on how it was located which we really didn't feel like reading.  After that was a hitch hike down the dirt road to the Sawtelle Resort, where we camped and ran into our friends Andy and Leah and Action and Shortstack - two couples we have hiked on and off with since Glacier.  

The next day was another CDT road walk but we managed to camp only a few miles from the Yellowstone National Park boundary.  The trail comes into the park from the west and beelines straight to Old Faithful where a post office, lodge and general store are located among throngs of tourists. The walk into the park was mostly flat and forested with the occasional smell of sulfer and bubbling mud pot.  The real fun came when we got within a few miles of Yellowstone as the crowds of tourists out for sub 2 mile hikes started to thicken.  We got on the upper basin area right as a thunderstorm hit, drenching us and the unprepared tourists with rain and clearing the boardwalks that line the geothermal pools and geysers.  A gas station convenience store next to the Old Faithful lodge served to dry us out and we warmed up with hot coffee before getting dinner next door.  

Old Faithful at dawn

The next problem was where to sleep!  It was almost dark so hitching out to the town of West Yellowstone would be tough, and the Old Faithful lodge was both booked and far far out of our price range. We did stop in the bar for a drink and met Brice and Whitni - owners of the Knotty Pine Dinner Club in Victor, Idaho.  They were super interested in our hike and offered to host us when we passed through the Jackson area! This was huge since all the lodging in Jackson is crazy expensive and it had been several hundred miles since our last zero day or day with no miles hiked. They bought us a beer, exchanged phone/email contacts and we parted ways to figure out where to sleep. I decided the best option was to stealth camp away from the lodge, so we made our way back into the wet bushes and found a secluded spot.  

The next morning we packed up and wandered back to the lodge for an all you can eat buffet - a literal magnet of any thru-hikers within a dozen miles! Sure enough, we ran into Patch, Grits and Raven who all wanted to do the Teton Route that I had mapped over the winter.  They even had copies of my maps!  We decided to team up since there are a lot of unknowns and I seemed to know what I was doing (not actually true).  After breakfast we got on the same permits and made our way out of the Old Faithful area (after a geyser eruption of course) and to our first designated campsite.  Naturally we stopped for as soak in two separate hot springs en route, only making our campsite after dark.

Hot Stream!

The next day we had to hike out of the park boundaries but I didn't know how many miles it was since the Yellowstone park map doesn't show it, turned out it was more than we could do in a day!  We ended up about 6 miles from the park boundary so we stealth'd again in an empty designated site - making sure to get out early before any rangers would be out on patrol.  The weather turned foul again and it started to rain within an hour of our feet hitting the ground.  Raven started finding chanterelle mushrooms so we dreamed of cooking them up that night and soaked our cold feet in a steamy thermal stream.  We got to a junction just out of the park and made a wrong turn onto a horse trail that ended up taking us close to where we wanted to go, but the trail wasn't on the map so we weren't quite sure when we would get there.  From the trail head we walked a mile on the road to Flagg Ranch - a ranch, hotel, RV park that was booked for the night but let us dry out in their lobby and stuff our faces with frozen burrito's from their convenience store (despite the smell...).

That afternoon we left as the skies seemed to clear and made our way to Polecat hot springs, only a mile or two from the ranch but completely deserted since you have to walk there.  We soaked for an hour or so in the 104ish degree water before finally hiking out down Grassy Lake Road to the next trailhead into Teton National Park - our 5th national park of this trip!  We found decent camping about a mile past the trail head and set up for the night, again almost at dark.  Raven's chanterelle's were delicious cooked in olive oil and added to our dinners and we continued to find more of them the next few days along the snake river and nearby drainages.  

The next day we continued our hike to the Teton's and eventually reached the crest at Jackass Pass - a mellow pass along the border between the national park at Targhee National Forest.  The northern  Teton Crest Trail (TCT) continues to follow the crest of the ridge which is also the east-west border between national park and national forest.  No permit is needed to camp in the national forest so we tried to camp on that side of the crest.  As we hiked Raven, Grits and Heartbreaker and I got ahead of Patch by a few minutes.  We were looking for a junction to a trail that would take us along a traverse of  Young's Point and Red Mountain but didn't see it.  All the other junctions were well marked with aluminum national park style signs and fairly obvious.  We realized we had blown past where the junction would be by over a mile, all downhill.  Rather than backtrack, we decided to continue down to another junction and take a different trail back up to the TCT.  When we got there, that trail quickly disappeared and we were forced onto a bush wack up the ridge to find the TCT.  

Heartbreaker was struggling with the grade, the blow-downs and the chest high grass so Raven and Gritz pushed ahead, assuming we would catch up, which we didn't.  We ended up missing the faint TCT and heading up to the edge of a small cliff.  I knew the TCT would have to go above or below the cliff and it wasn't above, so we headed back down to the bottom where Rachel spotted a blaze on a tree.  We were back on the TCT which picked back up somewhere between us and the missing junction.  It was almost dark but we continued to find a good campsite.  As we sat and figured out how much longer to hike, we saw Patch approaching in the gloom of dusk.  He had searched and searched for the missing junction and eventually determined that trail didn't exist anymore and followed our route.  

We continued on up towards Nord Pass for a while but Rachel and I were pooped, so we made camp among some elk bugles a little ways before the pass while Patch pushed on to catch Gritz and Raven.  He promised to wait at the next lake if he didn't catch, where we found him the next morning.  We hiked on together to finish the northern part of the TCT and to the start of the cross country portion that would connect back into the national park and the most popular portion of the trail.  Originally I had planned on doing this northbound, but we were headed south.  This meant that the talus and scree fields we had to cross would now be on the downhill portion of the segment instead of uphill, which makes them much slower and sketchier to cross.  

We got to the end of the northern TCT in granite basin around 5 pm, right past our cutoff time but a little too early to quit.  There were also several small thunder cells that were passing through to the north.  We talked about it and decided to push on anyway with the option of camping up high on the ridge.  This turned out to be a fantastic idea since we climbed up to the crest in the golden light of dusk, rounded Littles Peak and BAM! There was the Grand Teton mastiff in all its glory.  This was easy cross country and beautiful views, now to find where to camp!  I led the way, scouting ahead as we skirted the cliffs to the west of Solitude Lake and over some short class 3 sections.  Just below us, on the way down to the lake were several large grassy pads with small streams nearby.  We had water for camping but wouldn't need it.  The grass made a perfect campsite and we were protected from the wind by the cliffs above an below us.  We even had a perfect view of the Grand at dusk.  It was the greatest campsite of my life. 

Our first full view of the Tetons!

Greatest campsite of our lives!

The next morning we started the slow process of navigating our way down the talus slopes and short scrambles to solitude lake.  Rachel was having a tough time of it and our progress was frustratingly slow.  We eventually made it and hit hordes of day hikers out to see "solitude" lake.  We then started the rest of the TCT while Patch made his way to Jackson to resupply.  

Rachel down climbs a short scramble after lowering her pack to me.

The southern TCT is phenomenally gorgeous and phenomenally popular with casual backpackers.  They can take the tram up to 10,000 feet, removing most of the elevation gain. As a result, we saw lots of people with enormous packs who stared wide eyed at our lightweight, minimalist setups.  The views of the Grand and Schoolhouse Glacier were epic, possibly the most scenic hiking of the trip and not on the CDT! We continued our hike and camped near Death Canyon shelf by the border with the national forest.  We still didn't have cell service, so I used Rachel's Delorme In-reach to email Brice and Whitni that we thought we'd be at the Moose Creek trail head for pickup by 4 pm the next day, about 20 miles away.  We barely made it, catching them about 20 minutes into their hike up to meet us.  Brice and Whitni proceeded to spoil us, taking us to the bar, then dinner, then their beautiful home for two days where they lent us their car and even drove us back to Jackson to start the next part of our hike into the Gros Ventre wilderness (pronounced grow-vaunt) and then the Wind River range.  

Brice and Whitney - epic trail angels!

For any would-be TCT-CDT hikers check out the Knotty Pine in Victor!  You can hitch easily from Teton Pass!

We started the Gros Ventre portion from the Cache Creek trail head.  As soon as we entered the wilderness boundary we almost missed the turn for the Granite Highline Trail, which was actually behind us and hidden in thick grass.  Patch, Gritz and Raven had left less than an hour before us and weren't so lucky, they continued straight into the maze of unmarked trails in the Gros Ventre range.  We hiked up and along the highline trail, following the high ridge in the western part of the range, going up and down side ridges branching off from the crest.  The trail was tricky to follow with many game trails leading downhill and was almost overgrown in high grasses.  I used the GPS track several times to keep us on track.  At one point we head wooping but couldn't find the source.  We continued on and at a break the trio caught us, they had spent all day trying to find the highline trail until they saw us above them.  They bush wacked up and caught us!  It was getting dark and campsites were few and far between on the trail since it spends most of the time traversing a ridge.  We had found a good one and decided to sit for the night but the trio was worried about running out of food, so they pushed on past dark without a GPS track.  I figured they had lost the trail again but found out later they stayed on track.  

The next day we made our way down to the road, debated stopping in yet another hot springs and decided to go for it.  We managed to hitch a ridge 2 miles up to Granite Hot Springs, a $6/person developed hot springs that looked more like a swimming pool.  It was nice and relaxing, worth the time but full of families.  I think I would have felt very weird as a solo hiker, so it was nice to have Rachel.

Granite Hot Springs!

We then climbed steeply up nearly 3,500 vertical feet up the Swift Creek Trail to an unnamed pass near Anntoinette Peak and the high alpine portion of the Gros Ventre range.  It was almost as good as the Teton's with easy walking and beautiful vistas.  We followed the Gros Ventre River trail immediately back down and made camp five miles or so from the Kinky Creek Trailhead, sad to have left such an incredible area so quickly.  I realized later we could have gone cross country to the Tosi Creek trail, but that's for next years hikers.  

The Gros Ventre Range!

The next day was mostly roadwalking once we got to the Kinky Creek trail head.  We met some USFS guys out grading the dirt road who suggested a bushwack shortcut, which I botched and ended up adding time but whatever. We decided to ford the Green River at the end of the day to cut off a mile or two of roadwalking back to the CDT.  It got really cold that night and all our wet stuff was frozen solid in the morning, yay!  

  

We then caught a ride to the Green River Lakes campground instead of 9 more miles of monotonous dirt road walking.  The Green River Lakes were beautiful but smokey due to the entire northwest being on fire.  Oh well.  The winds were pretty, but the best parts were two off-trail alternates - Knapsack Col and Cirque of the Towers.  I'll let the pictures speak for themselves.

Knapsack Col!

Heading up to Texas Pass and Cirque of the Towers

Cirque of the Towers at Dusk

We left the CDT at the Seneca Lake trail and ran into two friends from my PCT hike in 2013, Fun Size and Lighthouse on their way back in.  We got an easy ride to Pinedale, resupplied and decided to skip southern Wyoming.  We met Ridgerunner and K2, who had a ride setup with their aunt from Lander to 30 miles north of the Colorado border at Battle Pass.  We arranged to tag along and skip the more desolote, monotonous portion of the CDT and get to Colorado earlier in order to avoid snowstorms later in the season.  We are section hikers after all!  

Wyoming photos are here

Teton specific photos are here

CDT Montana!

Finally! A computer and time to use it! Sorry for the long wait but the towns we hit in northern Montana all coincided with weekends when the libraries were closed.  A long stretch of towns like Leadore and Lima with fewer than 200 residents followed with no reliable internet or libraries. We met a couple in Yellowstone that offered to host us just outside Jackson in the town of Victor, ID for a few days!  Thank you Brice and Whitney!!

Anyway, enough excuses! Rachel and I hit the trail at Chief Mountain in Glacier National Park on June 14th and almost immediately saw a bull moose 5 miles in. Rewinding a bit, we flipped up to Glacier from Chama, NM in a rental car with former northbounders now flippers Handstand, Machine Gun and Kathleen (not a trail name...) to split the costs, so we all got permits together for the designated campsites in Glacier ($5/night/person).

The rangers were little help with the snow conditions on the high passes in Glacier since they get very few backpackers in the early spring and apparently don't get out much themselves.  However, Laurie, the kindest waitress you will ever meet (she works at the diner in the town of East Glacier) assured us the passes were totally fine and the record low snow would not trouble us.  She has hiked every inch of the park and seems to know more than the rangers!

Glacier requires backcountry permits for every night you stay at designated campsites, which I hate.  Of course you can never get the campsites you want, so we ended up with a 9 mile day, a 15 mile day, a 30 mile and a 20 mile day.  Did I mention I really hate being told where I can camp?!  Anyway, the passes were incredible, sort of shattered mounds of shale with sheer walls looming above.  We had some rain and some hail but mostly the weather was great, the hiking difficult and the snow almost a non-issue.  I did end up teaching Rachel and Kathleen some self arrest on a safe snow slope since we had ice axes and there was a small chance of a fall.  A few hikers just went through with hiking poles and no microspikes or axes but I felt better having them.

The 30 mile day was a challenge but only went over one pass so it was mostly easy walking.  To save two miles we forded a river early, rather than hike a mile downstream to a bridge and a mile back upstream.  The next day we were pooped and didn't quite make our 20 miles, so we camped off-permit with another thru-hiker.  That was a great idea since the next 5 miles were over pitamaken pass which had the most snow of all and took the longest to get over.  Who did we run into on the backside of the pass? Laurie!

Rachel got some kind of ankle strain on the way to Two Medicine, so we hitched back to East Glacier and slack packed the 15 miles inbetween the two areas after a day off.  On the pass named "scenic point" were a dozen bighorn sheep which was cool.  We could have slack packed the next 15 out of the park too to the highway but wanted to keep moving.

The next section of trail corssed the Bob Marshal Wilderness complex, a 1600 square mile area set aside from development.  Most of it was flat along rivers with small climbs up low passes.  Our feet were usually wet from river crossings and there was a 40 mile long burn area to cross, just in time for a heat wave. We took a beautiful shortcut over Spotted Bear Pass and ended up hiking this section with "true southbounders" Andy and Leah and flipper Memphis who we met in Chama. Handstand and Machine Gun and Kathleen were too quick for us, especially with Rachels bum ankle and foot.

We reached our resupply - a maildrop at Benchmark Ranch only to discover we didn't send ourselves enough food!  Fortunately the town of Lincoln would come 70 miles earlier than our planned resupply of Helena so we could just go in earlier than we planned.  The last 40 miles to Lincoln were brutal climbs straight up mountains in the damn heat wave so that didn't help either.  We missed a turn just before they started and added 5 bonus miles to our stretch too, yay!  Lots of the signs in the Bob were confusing, either pointing halfway between two trails or labeled "continental divide" which is not the continental divide trail...

Anyway, the next few hundred miles were very hilly and not especially memorable.  We ran into Colin of www.tramplite.com who I met on the PCT two years ago and hiked with him a bit, also Treebu passed us on his 37 miles per day average and Rachels injuries eventually healed.  Rachel and I ended up hiking a lot with Andy, Leah, Memphis, and two other SOBO's Action and Shortstack.  We all decided to do the loop around Butte instead of a 40 mile roadwalk that would save 100 miles.  The trail was new and touted as really nice on the facebook forum but mostly it was boring with some incorrect mileage that made for a frustrating day. The Butte folk festival was a lot of fun though, especially since volunteers drove you around on golf carts.  Back on trail, we hitched into Anaconda and resupplied before entering the Anaconda-Pintler Wilderness, a beautiful set of mountains with peaks over 10,000 feet.

The Pintlers were beautiful and we did a few short cross country alternates off the trail, including one where we met Patch to Sawed Cabin Lake.  These were fun and filled with wildlife, unlike the trail.  The next sections from Darby to Leadore and Lima were unexpectedly spectacular but the hiking was straight up and down along the divide with the Idaho-Montana border.  The towns were tiny, only a gas station convience store and one restaraunt so we didn't linger.  At this point we were both pretty pooped since our last rest day was in Butte, 500 miles back.  We took the Macks Inn route - a shortcut that would save almost 40 miles but started with a bushwack through a waist deep beaver pond up to the most remote source of the Missouri River to the Sawtelle Peak area.  A quebecois couple offered us a ride down to town instead of the 9 mile roadwalk so we took it and had a relaxing day.  We finished the remaining 14 mile roadwalk back to the trail and enjoyed the cruiser 24 mile day into Old Faithful Village except for the giant thunderstorm that struck a mile out of "town".

Rachel and I dried out in the gas station convience store there, got a burger next door and wandered around looking for the bathrooms in the lodge.  While we were wandering, a couple at the bar asked if we were CDT hikers (maybe they could tell by the holes in my shoes or just the stink?) and we chatted with Brice and Whitney of Victor, Idaho for a while.  We told them of our hair-brained alternate to the Tetons and they told us about their restauraunt - the Knotty Pine - next door in Victor and offered to host us! This was huge for two reasons: 1 - we were exhausted and 2 - the town of Jackson is ridiculously expensive with almost no lodging options.

Anyway, here's the pictures from Glacier

Pictures from the rest of Montana/Idaho (still uploading...):