Part Thirty Six

​     August 9th - 10th             Beaverhead-Deerlodge NF                 (Go to Pt 1)
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The canyon bottom hiking wasn’t too bad at first, kind of cool, actually, so we got suckered into the lower canyon which, as the gorge gradually narrowed, became more and more a crash-and-bash bushwhack through thickets and canyon bottom deadfall.  We forearm-swiped our way through a strangle of saplings out to a marsh then squished our way across into the woods on the far side.

I was watching the ground underfoot so as not to trip over stuff, which at the moment consisted of tree branches and forest debris, when, with no hint of any change to the forest floor, I stepped forward but my foot did not land and instead I began to fall.  “Craig!” I screamed as I plunged forward into a woodland bog.

​Somehow, I did not pitch forward too much and, miraculously, my feet landed on an angled log that lay hidden beneath the surface.  My automatic response when I had started to fall forward was a backward windmilling of my arms to catch my balance and when I did this my hands 

and forearms immediately splashed into the muddy, debris-covered slop just behind me, arresting a continued forward fall into the liquid mud.  All this happened in an instant.

When I’d screamed out Craig’s name, he had spun around just in time to see me throw a backstroke into the forest floor and for one, long, drawn out moment I stood up to my armpits in soupy mud, balanced on a slimy, bog-log, trying to process what wtf just happened while Craig stood frozen in his step trying to understand how I could possibly be chest deep in the forest floor.  Finally, I yelled “Craig, you gotta get me outta here!”

Exactly what he was supposed to get me out of he had no idea until he rushed forward to help and I yelled “Back-up! Back-up! It’s a bog! Get back!”  I balanced helplessly on the log about eight feet beyond Craig’s grasp and now the bog’s unknown and undetectable edge had become a rescuer’s trap.  

We both froze again.  I was looking to Craig for a way out of this mess, in a hurry, and he was looking at me like ‘What the ?!?? have you gotten yourself into?!?’  Figuring he’d need something, Craig spun around to look for a branch that would service as a pole while back in the mud pit I realized the angled log I was precariously treading on stuck up out of the bog onto the bank about ten feet away.

To Craig’s immediate frustration there wasn’t a long enough branch close by so he had to dash further into the woods, frantic to find a pole.  The forest floor was littered with branches but not one of them long enough so in a furry Craig started to rip a six-foot branch from a tree trunk.  

In the moments Craig had been materializing a rescue pole, I felt my feet begin to slip and instinctively I had lurched forward into the muck to grab ahold of the log beneath the surface before my feet slipped out.  Doing this submerged my face and in a full-blown panic I began to bicycle my feet on the slime-backed log and blindly grab my way a few feet up the trunk so my head us up just as Craig had broken the branch free.  

Craig whirled around bounded back toward the bog, branch in hand, as I lunged my left hand forward for the dry end of the trunk sticking up out of the bog - but missed, just as my feet slipped away and Craig’s rescue branch somehow found my flailing right hand.  

Craig gave a pull, my left hand finally reached the end of the trunk and my feet found enough ground to push my knees up onto the bank where I clamber-crawled away from the pit faster than a running turtle.  The whole thing was over in less than a minute.

I stumbled around in shocked silence, dripping slimy mud everywhere.  Craig stood looking me up and down and finally said “Man, what happened?!”  “Shit, I don’t know, I didn’t see it.” I replied. 

Then it struck me, Craig had been out front and I had been following, shouldn’t he be the one covered in slime?  Incredulously I asked, “How did you miss that thing??” Craig looked over at the bog which had now melded back into the forest floor and shrugged “I don’t know.”

Well, there was nothing more to be done other than continue down the canyon and hope we didn’t end up skeletons at the bottom of another bog.  But here’s the real beauty, not 300 yards downstream from the bog we stepped back onto the trail which had stayed on a bench higher up until it was safe to drop into the canyon. ​

Inattention, once again (no need to assign blame here), had led us to stray off onto a little, ‘side-trip’ path down into the canyon that went nowhere.  As I now plodded down the well-traveled trail, covered in drying quick-mud, I reflected back on the Boy Scout madness back at Blair lake was pretty sure those Scouts had managed to stay on the right trail coming down – all 30 of them. ​

By the time we spilled out to Cole Creek in the Red Lakes Valley, all the mud covering me had dried into thick flakes and my shorts were like cardboard.  I spent a long time in the creek that evening washing off baked-on slime from my skin and clothes which by now had been kiln dried in the sun and was practically impervious to water.

The next morning we were out of camp early and did the road-warrior thing all day over Red Rock Pass and around Henry’s Lake, arriving at Targhee Pass around mid-afternoon. We descended eastward 

toward Wyoming and made one final camp just west of West Yellowstone out along the Madison River. That evening we watched a majestic sunset over the valley knowing that, as far as walking the Continental Divide was concerned, tomorrow would be our last day in the state of Montana. ​

Sunset over Madison River, August 9th, 1977

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Go to Part 37

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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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