Part Seven

     May 26 – June 2             Bob Marshall Wilderness                    (Go to Pt 1)

From Marias Pass we climbed a gentle rise then followed a two rut track into the Two Medicine Creek Valley. Everything seemed disjointed. My mind had been so consumed by getting through Glacier that this sudden continuation into another range of mountains caught me flat on my feet.  All of our gear and supplies were prepped, packed and ready to go but my head just wasn’t in to it. And, after being dumped back out into this harsh weather, the search for motivation was proving futile.  ​

A few miles up into the valley we were faced with a wide river crossing that neither one of us was willing to take our boots and socks off to ford; it was too cold and we were too miserable in the circumstance to think about crossing that freezing, knee-deep whitewater barefoot.  We quit on the day right there and made camp in a small clearing by the river.

​The next morning saw no change, cold and gusting winds with the brutal river crossing still in front of us. With camp packed, we hobbled down to the river in unlaced boots, then sat down to remove our socks, roll up our knickers, hoist the pack weight back up onto our bare feet and start across the rocks into the river. ​

Click on the map for a larger image

It was impossible to hurry because the rocks were slick, placed haphazardly at all angles, with whitewater making every step blind; then there was that blasted pack, threatening to throw me in the river with every unbalanced move, which was most of the time.  When I finally reached the other bank my feet were completely numb from the cold and I had torn skin on all four ankle bones that were surely going to bruise by afternoon.

As we were preparing to start off again, I went to buckle the yolk strap to my shoulder straps, the ‘harness’ strap that distributes the pack weight properly across the upper body, and the buckle broke. “Goddamnit!”  I spit. Craig looked over and saw the broken buckle in my hand and gave me a downcast look. “Mmm, did you want to fix that right now?” Meaning, ‘You don’t really want to fix that right now, do you?’ “Naw, I fix it later,” I replied.  

Here we go again, shitty weather, bruised ankles, a load so heavy it should have been on a mule and now a mile after mile fight with my pack straps.  All this without pay, mind you, and no tangible reason, whatsoever, to be doing what we were doing, which, at the time, did kind of lead me to ask “Why the fuck are we doing this?”

​We carried on up the valley and not too long after lunch we got forced out by the terrain into another river crossing.  The river sprawled out wide at this point and was relatively shallow with rocks exposed above the rapids.  There appeared to be enough dry stones to link up a rock-hop across to a small island in the river, so we left the boots on and proceeded to step, hop and jump from one tippy rock to another out to the island.  

The river channel on the other side of the isle was deeper but there were some boulders that stuck up out of the water which we thought might get us to the far bank.  Naturally, not one of those rocks was flat or conveniently placed and they were anything but ‘stepping stones’.  I jumped from the edge of the island out to the first boulder and steadied my balance. The next three rocks had to be taken in succession at an ​

almost running stride with no stopping before a fourth boulder offered a landing spot to regroup.  From there, one more rock-hop got me to a splashed finish on the far bank. ​

Now Craig was out to the first boulder, steeling himself to make the kangaroo run across to the landing spot. He committed to the sequence of stones but on the last rock, before the safety boulder, I watched in shock as his foot slipped and the pack threw him over into the river. The water was probably only waist deep where he went down but the pack pulled him under and the powerful current started to drag him downstream.  

As I watched all this instantly unfold, it suddenly occurred to me that I might have to go in after him, so I dropped my pack and started to run downstream through the brush, sticks and rocks. Luckily, Craig had been an outstanding, high school wrestler in his day and in no way was a mere, 90 pound pack going to pin him anywhere. He righted himself back onto his feet in one quick reversal move and then practically launched himself, pack and all, toward the bank. 

Craig pulled himself up out of the rapids and stood by the edge of the river, absolutely pouring with cardiac-stopping melt-water, and the look of pure shock on his face was total; shock from the near freezing water and the classic look of ‘What the fuck just happened here??’ shock.  He dropped his pack in the gravel and water oozed from the seams. 

Well, this certainly changed our afternoon plans in a hurry.  The miserable cold coupled with the wind chill was going to send Craig hypothermic in a hurry.  We had to set up the tent and get him out of the wind; the Gerry Year Round tent.  This was bad getting worse.  We were on river bottom gravels and this damn tent was going to need ten unfailing stakes to stand up properly.  

​Our lost, North Face Oval-intension tent would have popped up in minutes without a single stake; not that that was driving me absolutely mad while I cursed and beat seven marginal stakes into the riverbed pitrun. Craig got in the tent and changed into his long johns while I started lashing all the wet clothes and pack items to tree limbs for drying.  We were getting nowhere on this trail; two days in and we were already a day behind.

Around sunset the wind died down and the cloud cover began to break.  We were sitting on a couple of pieces of driftwood looking at the sagging Gerry tent while I stitched a new buckle to my pack’s yolk strap. We were talking about what a great tent the Oval-intension had been (the one that blew away) which brought us around to talk about how losing that tent had caused a derailing effect on our focus.  I admitted to Craig 

how apathetic I was feeling and how, after Glacier, I was struggling to get my motivation back to the intensity level required for what we were doing.

Craig voiced similar feelings but was more direct in tracing the soured mood back to the blown away tent and how the attitude had gone all gloomy right after that happened. He looked over at me, fairly so. He continued with his train of thought, pointing out that we were here to immerse ourselves in a rugged, mountain adventure so “screw the tent and falling in the river and the shitty weather, we’ve still got a lot of trail to go.” “It’s your turn to wash out the pot” he finally said handing me what was left of the burnt pasta at the bottom of the pan.   

Sun in the morning certainly helped moral and brought back a revitalized sense of energy.  We finally crossed out of the Two Medicine Valley, dropping down to Badger Creek where the rest of the day would be defined by our river crossing tactics. Of seven crossings, we managed to find five, dry passages, using hop-scotch stones to get across, and only twice did we have to de-boot and subject our feet to the ice-dagger torture that the barefoot river crossings were.  

Toward the end of the day we got suckered off in the wrong direction by an errant trail sign and spent an hour angling up the side of a mountain before finally figuring out the sign had sent us up the wrong fork. Having to backtrack to South Badger Creek was another mistake that cost us both time and energy; we didn’t make our camp until close to sunset, still short of the day’s objective.

It took us three days to work our way up through the South Badger Creek Valley, over Badger Pass and down into the Strawberry Creek Valley.  The days had turned warm and spring was suddenly in heat.  There was plenty of wildlife roaming about the valleys and we saw Black Bear, Moose, Bobcat, Osprey, Bald Eagles, Deer and Elk.  

For us, the new travel obstacle had become finding our way through the boggy, alpine wetlands that sprawled out across the river valleys and, in their spring run-off conditions, were saturated far beyond their boundaries. Unfortunately, this was also where the majority of the faint to vanishing trail tracked through.  

We learned right away that wet, soggy boots sucked and following several misadventures of stepping calf deep into liquid-soil that was cunningly disguised by thick moss and tall grasses growing on top, we realized we had to slow down and seek out stretches of ground that would float our weight.  

​All this skirting around and tip-toeing through the boggy wetlands was time consuming and challenged our ability to read the subtle terrain.  On the Strawberry Creek side of Badger Pass we found the same marshy wetlands but we also found what should have been a long stretch of good trail already churned up into mud-butter glue by horses, making for miles of slip-sliding trail conditions with globbed-on mud stuck to our boots. 

Two camps later, Strawberry Creek led us up into the Clack Creek valley where a faint trail climbed up out of the gorge onto a high, narrow plateau at the base of the Trilobite’s east facing wall.  The surrounding views were huge with the shale and limestone walls towering up behind us and the Clack valley falling steeply away below. ​

In the near-distance, titanic, thunderhead clouds churned their way up the Strawberry Creek valley, flashing lightning, rolling thunder and pulling with it a dark wall of water that poured into the lower Strawberry Creek valley.  We hurried to find a sheltered tent site but all the terrain was exposed, so we staked out the Gerry among the stunted trees, keeping an anxious eye out across the valley to see if the electrified tempest would eventually turn its furry up into the Clack valley.

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​Go to Part 8

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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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