Part Nineteen

​     June 30 - July 5              Beaverhead Deerlodge NF, MT              (Go to Pt 1)

We both made it down the last stretch of the rocky, horror show on legs that were trembling from both fatigue and stress by the time we reached the bottom.  We took a break in the tundra alongside a splashing stream to regroup and let the adrenaline washout.

I was starting to feel somewhat recovered 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’.

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.

Click on map for a larger image

Once we were on good trail I was able to step into a comfortable pace and switch over to auto-hike mode. When I reached the river below Twin Lakes, I stopped to look around for a crossing point which is when I noticed there was nobody behind me, namely Craig.  There was a decent log to get across the river so I crossed over, dropped my pack and sat down to wait for him.  ​

I didn’t think I’d have to wait long but when 5 minutes went by and still no Craig, I thought it odd that he would be that far behind.  10 minutes passed and I got to thinking maybe, since he was sick, he’d reached a point to where he had to stop.  After 15 minutes I finally decided I’d better go back and look for him.

I re-crossed the log and walked back up to the trail which is when I happened to notice an all-too-obvious trail-blaze on one of the trees up ahead where a fork split the trail with one fork headed toward the river. I got an ‘oh shit’ feeling in my gut and started up toward the fork. 

When I got to the river fork I followed it back to where there was a double-log bridge crossing at what was the trail’s actual crossing point.  I looked down at the approach to the log and sure enough, there were fresh Galibier boot prints in the mud, Craig’s boot prints.

It was pretty clear what was going on now.  I had crossed the river too soon and while I had dilly-dallied on what was actually a fisherman’s trail Craig had walked right by me on the opposite side of the river and crossed the bridge further up, like everybody else. 

I had left my pack back at the fisherman’s path but took off up the trail after Craig.  This was quite the pickle; Craig was now in front of me thinking he was still behind and doing double-time trying to catch-up to me while, in reality, I was the one that was behind doing triple-time trying to catch-up to him.
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Up ahead, Craig ran into some hikers coming down the opposite direction from the lakes and asked if they’d passed me, nope.  Now he’s wondering… ‘Could I have possibly passed him somewhere?’ Which made no sense at all but he figured if hikers coming down the trail hadn’t passed me then it must have happened somehow, so he dropped his pack and doubled back to look for me.  Well, we finally got our act together, I had to go back and get my stuff then we went down by the river to eat lunch.

After a prolonged lunch break, we continued on up the trail, crossing a boulderfield that dumped us out into a marsh.  As we continued on past the wetlands I started getting those damn stabbing pains in my gut and all of my energy was draining away, again.
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We climbed over a short pass, which seemed to take forever, descending to Storm Lake.  By the time we had made camp at Storm Lake we were both feeling ill and couldn’t face eating dinner but did decide to brew up some tea. I went to light the stove to boil water and nothing, there was no gas feeding out from the fuel container to the burner and I couldn’t get the darn thing beyond a spark.

Upper Twin Lakes Valley

For two hours we fiddled with the stove, disassembling, cleaning and reassembling all the parts we could but to no avail.   The stove was broken.  We had built a fire earlier to get the tea water going but this resorting to campfires for cooking was not going to work; we had to have a functioning stove.  

The busted stove was a grim stroke of bad luck but at the same time not all bad luck because we were in a place where getting out of the mountains to a town was actually a viable option.  We were camped at Storm Lake, two short miles from a Forest Service trailhead which was nine miles from the highway and the town of Anaconda was only ten more miles down the road.  

This being the 4th of July weekend there were people up in the mountains so our chances of getting a ride into town the following day seemed pretty fair.  Anaconda wasn’t much of a town but hopefully we could find a camp stove there. 
 
After sleeping until almost 10 a.m., we got up the next morning feeling better and with an appetite, so we rekindled the fire and cooked up some killer good, campfire pancakes.  The clouds had been building over the ridgeline all morning and not long after our pancake breakfast it started to rain.

The whole idea of getting down out of the mountains and hitch-hiking to Anaconda for a new stove got washed away as soon as it started to rain and we spent the next 5 hours listening to the steady drum of rain on our tent fly.  

Craig was still ploughing his way through ‘Shogun’ while I spent time flipping the pages of ‘Still Life with Woodpecker’.  Sometime around mid-afternoon we decided to eat and pulled out the lunch sack.

Later, after we had eaten, I started feeling those now familiar, stabbing gut pains that I’d suffered from for almost a week and then Craig started complaining of the same thing.  Finally, Craig declared “It’s the cheese.”    

I hadn’t considered the cheese because it tasted fine and there was no mold on it, which happened occasionally and we’d just pare off the moldy piece. “Really? Do you think that’s it?” I queried.  “It’s got to be” Craig replied.  “I was feeling a lot better before we ate and the cheese is the only thing I ate that could be bad. Now I feel like crap again.”  I thought about the hot, greasy cheese in the lunch bag and then it dawned on me that I always felt worse in the afternoon.

Storm Lake Camp

“And we’ve been eating this rotten shit all week?” I asked flatly. Craig pulled the cheese out of the lunch bag and only one days’ ration remained “It’s almost gone if you want the rest” he offered.  So the ‘German Gulch flu’ turned out to be a rotten brick of cheese which we had been diligently consuming for the past 5 days.  ​

The next morning was the 4th of July and it was cold, cloudy and windy.  We packed up our camp, hung the packs from a high limb and started the walk out to the trailhead.  The trail was a muddy mess from yesterday’s rain and the skies looked to be threatening with more.  

When we got to the trailhead there were no cars parked in the lot so we started pounding down the road.  We ran into a couple of fishermen further on but nobody heading out of the mountains until we had hiked most of the nine miles to the highway.  Finally, a couple heading to town gave us a ride in the back of their pick-up.

Long story short, the hardware store that had the camping gear was closed on the 4th so we stayed over in Anaconda and bought a new, Bluet cartridge stove the next morning.  We stopped into the local drug store on our way out of town for a fist full of candy bars, each, and then spent the better part of the day getting back up to our camp at Storm Lake.  
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The new stove worked great but we were guessing at how many cartridges we would need, so I was hoping the two we’d bought would get us to Salmon, Idaho. The weather had been cold and threatening all day but during the night it didn’t rain; it snowed, bringing with it a dim, grey morning with thick, stone-cold clouds oozing over the ridge. I poked my head out of the tent to a fresh blanket of snow covering the cirque and it was cold.

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Go to Part 20

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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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