CDT Day 104 (8/30/23)

Miles 2502.5 (Red line 2846.9)- 2532.2 (Red line 2876.6) (29.7 miles)

Verbatim

Today’s walking was hell. A rainy, wet, cold, chaffed hell. I found a great place to sleep in the rain last night. I had to run from the storm at dinner and quickly found a copse of pine to hide amidst.

Interlude: Hershey Squirts isn’t showering, but is complaining that I smell. He’s definitely sick, shivering in his bed, but won’t get up to better his situation. He’s hopeless.

Anyways, the pine needles were a wonderful sleep, and I was pretty dry in the morning.

The fire zone was amusing to walk through. The fighters at the station indicated how gentle the fire was burning on the opposite slope. And sure enough, there were only four or five hot spots billowing thick slow smoke. Not the most intimidating of fires. The fire didn’t even touch the trail, and I enjoyed cruising right along. The rain was soothing in the morning and I saw Wolf tracks!

However, by the time I’d walked half the miles out to the highway, the storm had really picked up. The wind was relentless as it blew down the highway. I contemplated walking the more direct highway route but decided against it on account of the cold wind. OH! I forgot to mention I saw Wolf tracks in the mud (No I didn’t I just was so tired I forget I’d already mentioned it)! Also, mud is tough to get traction in.

I walked the fifteen miles of mountainous windy hillside brushy trail into town. There were some good berries. I thought I’d accumulated a stress fracture, you could have met a Bear around any corner, and it was exceedingly blustery, wet, and cold. Like, real cold.

I finally arrived at the Looking Glass Hostel. It was fairly crowded. I had to wait to shower because an older lady, Resilient, came in shivering after just eleven miles which she walked back from the national park. I was shivering too! haha

The shower, when it came, was great. I ate a mushroom pizza. I looked forward to the next section. It was very social.

I liked the sociality, but also grated against how busy things were. I’ve grown accustomed to space and being alone. There’s no time to write a journal when you’re laughing away with others.

Post Note

Wolves are awesome. I would have loved to have seen a Wolf. Just existing in the same space as a Wolf is really powerful. I love it. To think those tracks were as fresh as the time between when it last poured during the night and the moment I passed them in the morning. With the fire closure pushing hikers off that section of the CDT, the Wolves were on the trail. :)

It was a very cold and wet day. Cold and wet is uncomfortable, but I had a lot to be grateful for. I knew I’d be in town. Wet and cold is only scary if you don’t have the assurance of an opportunity to become warm and dry once again. But, with town an ever diminishing amount of miles away, one can brute force their way through just about anything. Everything does hurt more when it’s wet and cold, however. I took exactly zero breaks between when I stood up in the morning and when I arrived at the hostel. Thirty miles of chaffing wet, slippery mud, thorny and freezing bushes, and pounding feet with heavy wet shoes, pack, and clothes makes for some numb and sore legs and shoulders. My shoulders hurt more than anything else. They were crying out with pain.

This is a pretty good example of the hardship of thruhiking. Thruhiking is simple; you walk. But thruhiking gets hard when you’re tasked, by natural forces completely out of your control, to walk under unusual and relentless pressures. You hurt, so you want to stop, but you can’t stop because you’ll get cold. You could stop and be warm is you put dry clothes on while you stop and then be warm until the point at which your dry clothes get wet. But if you do that you won’t have dry clothes to put on when you get to camp. Oh wait, you don’t have a second change of clothes anymore anyways because you mailed them home to lighten your pack so you could do bigger miles so that you could finish this trail before the fall weather really starts to show up with a vengeance and traps you in storms like the one you’re in today and so that your hips and legs wouldn’t hurt so much on the normal days. So now you’re wet and cold and need to make good on the fact that you’re presumably more rested because of the lack of weight you’ve had to carry since mailing your change of clothes home back in Colorado so that you could crush the miles you need to on days exactly like this. Tighten that pack and get to it. It’s time for the business end of thruhiking. And for the record, I didn’t mail any clothes home. That was a descriptive hypothetical to make a point.

And this is why it’s important not to yellow blaze. Halfway through the day I crossed a windswept highway which went directly into town so as to suffer the fifteen further miles of alpine hiking. You can’t skip it just because it gets hard. I walked fifteen miles of Glacier National Park on unkept trails in the woods and meadows of the south slopes of the southern mountains of the park that no one goes on. Maybe the best part of Glacier.

And as I came out of that rustic section of trail I saw the signs, reversed of course from my angle, for Glacier’s hiking trails. And painted over them were #landback tags. Walking the land has always been political.