Part Thirty Two

     August 1-4                                  Salmon NF, ID                            (Go to Pt 1)
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By the time we reached the small spring across from Tepee Mountain to make camp, I was cooked, through and through, and while the spring provided clear water, our hopes for a shady grove of trees got squelched when all we found were spotty shadows cast spindly pines.  We spent about an hour hunkered behind the meager protection of a couple of crispy-fried, pine hags until the sun lowered enough to venture back out and pitch camp.

That evening as we sat in the hot, dusty gravel making supper, my wandering mind kept obsessing on a humongous cob salad, loaded with everything, and a watermelon, while I watched a pot of smelly tuna noodles slowly begin to bubble on the stove; ahh…  so many wonderful ways to torment yourself out here.  

After the waaay-too-wrong-for-the-weather tuna noodles were finished, we reviewed the maps for the next day’s stretch. We had known in an 

abstract way this barren countryside was coming but now that we’d had a mouthful of this blistering, hill walking it was much easier to see from the maps that we would be in for a really long, grim day.

By 6 a.m. the next morning, the temperature was on the rise and we set out early to get in as many miles as we could before hell’s mid-day sun arrived.  We left the pine snags of Tepee Mountain with heads down, pounding off down the ridge.
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As we tromped along the hot dusty road, there wasn’t much, if anything at all, appealing about the hiking to take my mind off the interminable time drag.  Heck, these weren’t even mountains, big hills at best with land so plain a pogo-stick could manage it.  I struggled not to look at my watch because if I started doing that, ten minutes would turn into an hour.  

We reached Morrison Lake late in the morning, close to the halfway mile-marker to camp.  Thus far, intermittent clouds had provided some protection from the sun’s direct intensity and I had spent the morning watching each and every cloud that might shield us from the solar rays.

As a cloud would roll overhead I’d mentally clock the time it took for it to pass under the sun.  And because there was absolutely nothing else going on in my little world except the shade provided by the clouds, the tail-end of each cloud’s shadow became a mini- crisis.  I’d look out ahead to see sunlight racing across the ground towards us and despairingly count-off the final seconds to when the shade vanished and the sun steamrolled over us.  

And folks, in 1977 we’d never even heard of sun‘screen’.  At the drug store they sold suntan lotion, skin cancer in a convenient bottle, and we had scoffed at the idea of zinc-oxide, a thick, white, pasty, ‘sun cream’. But without any protection at all, we were laid bare to the sometimes laser effects of the sun, and on those days it just plain hurt.

kind or another all day and had only passed a few vehicles but the road that wound its way through the Sheep Creek canyon showed signs of use, so we tucked our tent in among the sage along the creek, out of sight.

The afternoon was a forced march across twelve miles of wasteland into the desolate canyon of Sheep Creek.  We had been on a road or track of one 

As we sat outside the tent that evening in this eerily empty canyon with nothing to talk about, I just felt this void inside, loneliness.  I mean, Craig was sitting right there but the trip, by default, was really a one man head-game. I don’t know what Craig had been thinking about all day as the hot, dusty, interminable hours drug on but by now I was running low on ‘happy thoughts’ and slipping into a sort-of mental void, a black hole. Forlorn and lonely was where the black hole was dragging me and this was going to be a really bad place for my mood to go dark.

Craig and I sat in silence. I looked around the desolate canyon and thought about my Dad and my Mom and wondered what my brother and sister were up to, I hadn’t talked to either one of them in ages.  Then I thought about friends back home, out having a great time on this summer’s night and melted into Dorothy, pining ‘There’s no place like home.’ This just sucked.

The next morning we continued south across more, uninterrupted desolation, then climbed out of the basin at Seventh Pass.  

From here we rejoined the baked-out ridge of the Divide for several more miles then followed an open draw down to Sawmill Creek where we picked-up a two track leading out to Junction Creek.

By the time we got to Junction Creek we were pretty wiped-out and there was some wavering about continuing another six miles to the Interstate since there was a pretty decent camp site by the stream but ​because of these damned, eight o’clock sunsets there was still too much daylight remaining not to push it out to Interstate 15 at Monida Pass.

We ended up making it to the Interstate before sunset with the most baleful howls coming from my poor ol’ dogs. I was whooped-beat tired but my feet were in agony; the muscles, the bones, the pressure points, the soles of my feet, everything just ached and the inflammation was being further inflamed by the scorching ground that was slow roasting my feet inside my boots.  Getting the load off had become an urgent matter.   

We were able to find water in the marshy grasses of Junction Creek’s headwaters down by the railroad tracks and made camp 

by the marsh not knowing if we’d get blasted out by trains all night long, but really who cared, the way sound traveled out here we could be miles away from those tracks and still get jolted awake if a train came through. 
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Luckily, no trains did come through during the night but the next morning I felt like trains had been blasting through nonstop.  I’d had a fitful night and by daybreak my head was mashed potatoes, I couldn’t breathe through my nose, my right ear was throbbing slightly and I felt like I’d been gut-punched.  I was so uncomfortable inside the tent that I was anxious to get out at first light and hoped some activity would help, which it did, a little.

Later, just as we’d saddled-up the packs, a train finally did come down the tracks to clatter-bang its way past for several minutes before we could head up the hill to negotiate the Interstate.  Unfortunately, on the east side of the Interstate we were blocked out by a long tract of fenced-in, range cattle.  ​

Thus far, fences hadn’t stopped us and, based on what we had deemed as ‘inadequate posting’, we had climbed over a number barbed wire barriers along the way but this fence line was posted ‘No Trespassing’ by anyone’s legal definition.  In addition, anyone climbing over the fence could clearly be seen from the Monida General Store parking lot for at least a mile.  

We dithered but resisted the urge to climb the fence and instead walked a few 

miles down a frontage road until we came across a dirt track that took us back up into the moonscaped hills.  And straight-up, when I refer to ‘moonscape’, if they did stage the moon landing, this is definitely where they did it (for those who are still looking).

We rose up out of the barren hills into higher meadows of sage which led to still higher meadows of wild grasses and sun-crisped plants.  When we reached Little Table Top Mountain I finally felt like we were back up in the mountains but the climb to get there had me draggin’ass and I called out for an early lunch; I wasn’t much hungry but did feel the need to stop and rest for a spell. 
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Fortunately, the sky was overcast and the temperature moderate because the way I was feeling, had it been another scorcher I would’ve been dead to hiking by now, pooled out like Gumby on a hotplate. ​​​

A while later as we sat idly on the open slopes of Little Table Top, two backpackers appeared over the rise to the east.  Craig and I looked at one another in surprise, “What on earth are two backpackers doing out here?” I wondered out loud.   We watched as they descended the slope towards us.  

As they neared I could see they were both carrying good sized, frame packs, similar to ours, their hiking shorts and T’s were tattered and dirt stained, same as ours, they wore low, hiking gaiters like ours and their boots were well worn but it was their muscular calves and quads that really caught my attention, they clearly had a lot of mountain miles on them, same as ours.  Who were these guys?

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Go to Part 33

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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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