Part Eighteen

​     June 27 -  June 30                   Deerlodge NF, MT                      (Go to Pt 1)

We dropped the packs, pulled off our boots and sat back in the midst of this splendid, botanical display to eat lunch.  Craig had been off-pace all morning and wasn’t much interested in eating; saying he was feeling some kind of funk he lounged back against his pack and dozed-off.

Sugarloaf & Grassy Mtn

I ate my usual ration of nuts, cheese and sausage then dipped into Craig’s ration for an extra bite, just to make his load a little lighter too, right?  Besides, he was asleep.  The sun was warm and after topping off my lunch with some of Craig’s ‘extras’, I settled back to absorb the whole fantastical scene.  An hour and a half later I woke up.    

I rousted Craig, who started to cause me a little concern with how sluggishly he lumbered back up onto his feet, only to then stand and stare at his pack "Hey, Craig, common man, let's go" I prodded, turning back out along the ridge.  Near the base of Sugarloaf Mountain we found a spring of cold, clear water gurgling out of a thicket of Columbine that looked like the perfect place to stop and make camp.  

Craig was feeling a little better by suppertime and ate most of his ration but was happy to pass on the leftovers. In the morning, Craig felt better but now I was feeling the funk, weak and lethargic as we pulled out of camp.

We climbed over the top of Sugarloaf Mountain then descended three, gentle miles of flowered, alpine meadow to the long, uphill grind along the southeast flank of Grassy Mountain.  We crested over the top of Grassy then dropped down to the west shoulder where we were faced with a descent of over 1,000 feet to Mill Creek. 

​The entire, descending slope was open, grassy terrain and did not look threatening at all from where we stood, but things did not get off to a very good start when, barely 100 yards down the slope, I slipped and fell hard onto the only visible rock for miles, and it only got worse from there.

Click on map for a larger image

Naturally, we got sucked into a gully that progressively got steeper and the real bugger was that the gully was lined with all this slick, wettish grass that proceeded to take us right to the edge of what was possible to get down without the use of ropes (which we didn’t have, anyways).  The mad-gravity made down-stepping a vicious, one-legged, deep-knee bend, leaving the downhill foot little time to plant before gravity would take over.
 
The grade finally got so steep that it was getting hard to simply even stand without slipping and we were spending more time arresting slides down the slick grass than we were navigating on our feet. I felt on the verge of a rag-doll descent the whole way and it was like ‘Shit! Even the damn grass out here wants a piece of me.’

We eventually got down the gully’s final slide but were a little beat-up by the time we made it to Mill Creek, stopping at the river to nurse varying degrees of grass-rash before approaching the next obstacle, crossing the river. 

The shallowest part of Mill Creek was also the widest part of the river but we pieced together enough rock-hops to get started and, with a few kangaroo jumps mid-stream, we managed to get to the other side dry.  

We stopped for lunch on a cobbled beach along the riverbank and passed the lunch sack back and forth.  I ate but was still feeling washed-out with some pain in my gut and it started me wondering about some of the dank water we had been drinking.  
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After lunch we started up the Mill Creek trail, although to call what we were following a ‘trail’ would be to define the word as 'someplace in the woods' since we were continually climbing over deadfall, studying the pine-needled ground for trail traces and mostly just following our noses through the forest.  About an hour after leaving the cobbled beach I really started to feel like crap; lightheaded and weak-kneed with jousting pains flashing around in my gut.  ​

Camp Under Pine

I was feeling lousy, to be sure, but Craig was now suffering through his second afternoon of this debilitating crud with the added sap of nausea waves and dizziness.  We had a bunch of miles we needed to get behind us but as the afternoon wore on our pace continued to decline until, finally, neither one of us could push-it any further.  
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We got the tent up in a record amount of excessive time and energy expended before I crumped under a small tree to languish about the rest of the afternoon, wondering about the cause of the illness.  It kind of felt like the flu with stomach pains but where the heck could we have caught the flu?  German Gulch?  We fixed soup and noodles for dinner that evening even though neither of us had much of an appetite.

I did not sleep well at all during the night and in the morning I still felt wrecked with little interest in the breakfast granola.  Craig was no better off but we packed our stuff anyway and carried on up Mill Creek.

Our pace through terrain like this would have normally been around 3mph but as we labored on through the forest our forward progress dwindled to barely a mile and a half per miserable hour.  We were both sick, from what we did not know, and by mid-day we just didn’t have the strength to keep pack-muling our way up the valley, calling it quits short of Miller Lake. We ate nothing the rest of the afternoon and only had a cup of soup with rice for dinner.
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We both slept better that night and felt somewhat recovered in the morning, so we carried on up Mill Creek.  It took a long, steep climb to get out of the valley, eventually winding up to the top of a narrow ridge that strung itself between two, towering, unnamed peaks.  Our intention was to drop into the Twin Lakes valley on the opposite side of this ridge, so we walked across the narrow crest and took a look down the other side. 

“Holyshit!” I blurted out right as Craig was exclaiming the exact same thing. Looking down the west side of the ridge was like looking down a church steeple; it wasn’t vertical but it definitely qualified as ‘holyshit’ steep.

The wind was ripping over the ridge so we dashed behind a boulder to talk over what our options might be.  We pulled the map and studied the various ways to get down off the ridge but found nothing that was going to end us up where we needed to be, except the west side which we had just looked at.  We left our packs behind the boulder and went back out to have another look. 
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The mountain was in an active stage of decay and the entire west side was falling apart with loose scree, rocks and talus precariously stacked ata steepness that seemed impossible to hold rocks. Craig and I would have to take different lines of descent, well apart from one another, because we were going to cut loose a lot of rocks descending this face.

Ridge descent

We gathered up our gear and started down.  Just to the south of Craig’s line of descent, I keyed-in on a large fin of solid rock rising out from the debris where I hoped to find good handholds.  The holds were there and I was thankful to have them the first fifty feet or so as loose rocks shot out from under my feet, careening at ballistic speeds down the face.  
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After several hundred feet, the rock fin that I was using for stabilization ended abruptly and from this point forward it was going to be 500 feet of pulse-pounding descent where every downward movement had to be precisely controlled.

The dislodged rocks that bounced and cartwheeled off into oblivion provided a graphic visual of what could happen if either one of us lost it and, to be sure, I wasn’t just freaking out about my ability to control the descent; there were two of us that had to get down this thing unbloodied.

We both made it down the rocky, horror show unscathed but rattled to be sure.  We took a break in the tundra alongside a splashing stream to regroup and let the adrenaline washout.  ​​

Click on map for a larger image

I was starting to feel a little recoverd from the illness that had plagued me the last couple of days but Craig was bent over, squeezing his knees with a hard grip, trying to maintain his game-face and push through what was now his fourth day of this mysterious ‘German Gulch flu’.
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From the bottom of the west face we followed the stream down a ways then traversed across a thinly wooded plateau to find the trail leading to Twin Lakes.  It was apparent the descent had taken a lot out of Craig as he now lagged uncharacteristically behind.

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Go to Part 19​​

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The CDTC was founded in 2012 by volunteers and recreationists hoping to provide a unified voice for the CDT. Working hand-in-hand with the U.S. Forest Service and other federal land management agencies, the CDTC is a non-profit partner supporting stewardship of the CDT. The mission of the CDTC is to complete, promote and protect the Continental Divide National Scenic Trail, a world-class national resource. For more information, please visit continentaldividetrail.org.

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