I woke at about 4:00 in the morning to what I thought was wind moving through the nearby trees. Then I heard the sound again. It wasn’t wind.
I lifted my head out of the sleeping bag and held my breath, listening keenly. Off in the treeline, maybe 100 feet away, I heard a branch snap. Then another. I made sure my bear spray and knife were in arm’s reach.
In retrospect it’s amusing how ABSOLUTELY SURE I was that a bear had made off with my un-hung food bag during the night. I was mentally cataloging how many Clif bars were in my backpack to live on, and how I’d be able to boast that I had indeed been attacked by a bear (it was a supply-line attack! It counts!) But as the sun finally rose and I found my food bag undisturbed, I chuckled at my own skittishness. Hitting the trail in search of fresh water, I wondered whether it had even been a bear I’d heard. Then five minutes later…
Black or grizzly? You make the call!
There was bear scat a bit farther down the trail. Yep, so that was my official close encounter with a bear. I started singing or talking to myself as I rounded corners or walked into the wind. Continue reading Day 11: This far, no farther→
I woke up at the trailhead. It was 35 degrees and I couldn’t feel my fingers. I still had food to sort out; I knew I’d overpacked, but didn’t know by how much.
At the picnic table I sorted everything out and filled the waterproof, odor-proof bag with what I thought was five days’ worth of food, tossing out extra bags of couscous and Clif bars. Olive oil, peanut butter, tuna packets? Y’all can stay.
One of my last to-dos: repairing my broken pole strap, with its useful but amusingly vague built-in compass. (“North is, uh, that-a-ways. ish.”) I managed to do this in the process:
Gonna be GREAT left to my own devices.
Just as I was finalizing everything, I heard the clop of hooves, and marveled as an enormous line of pack mules sauntered past me and onto the trail. It was bad-ass old-school cowboyery in effect.
Final pack weight: 52 pounds. I was hoping for more like 45. But I could still stand upright. With a warm weather forecast, I made one last risky decision and left behind the waterproof REI jacket that I’d paid dearly for.
I was a bit late to work that day. I think it was after 9 AM when I started my car. JB and Sandy, on Mix 94.7, were talking about two planes that had hit two separate towers. I didn’t quite get what they were talking about, but I distinctly remember assuming it was something that had happened in a foreign country. Continue reading This has nothing to do with road trip.→
I was up and on my way at the usual time. I crossed back into Glacier just as the ranger was raising the flag, but only to half-mast, and I had to ask her why she’d done that. Oh yeah, it’s September 11th. I was kinda happy to have lost track of the date like that.
First trail of the day was to Iceberg Lake, a walk in the park (literally!) compared to the Highline from the day before. Good thing; my joints, especially my left knee, were achey. I hobbled along with the help of my poles. It’s 4.9 miles from the trailhead to the lake, just under 10 miles total.
That’s still a ways, mind you. I’m accustomed to distances as far as cars take them. Bear bell jangling, I made my way deep into the northern part of the park—this particular trail had been closed due to “bear frequenting” all the way up until the previous day, and the entire area to my right was still closed off. So I was scanning the area rather keenly.
I turned west into a mile-wide “cul-de-sac” formed by incredibly high cliffs. Iceberg Lake was at its base. It came as advertised.
(Author’s note: Okay, I’m out of time here. Still have several pre-written blog posts to publish, but you just gotta wait until I get back.)
Just south of and bordering Glacier National Park is a large area that goes by the romantic name “the Bob Marshall Wilderness”—or as it’s known to locals and REI shoppers, “The Bob.” And in the heart of the Bob, comprising part of the Continental Divide, is an enormous rock formation known as the Chinese Wall.
A bunch of you just started humming the Game of Thrones theme. Those who didn’t—uh, you’ll eventually be reading a lot of jokes about “taking the black” and the “White Walkers” that you won’t get at all. Sorry.
The Chinese Wall is my destination for the core of my big road trip. It’s a continuous 22-mile “cliff escarpment” (whatever that is) that rises 1,000 feet above the land to the east. I literally found out about it by turning on the Images part of Google Maps while I was poking around Montana and initially sketching this trip. I decided I wanted to see it in person. And I quickly learned that it’s a 2 1/2-day hike from the nearest parking space, or as far as I can tell, about the most remote location you can find in the lower 48.
I started researching my big backpacking adventure based around a singular goal, to stand at the base of this mammoth wall, and make it back bear-attack-free.
So that’s what I’ll be doing for the next five days.
Tonight—right after I post this, actually—I’m leaving Choteau, this small island of Wi-Fi accessibility, and driving back into the wall of mountains to my west. I park at a place called Benchmark, and first thing tomorrow, hit the trail.
As far as backpacking adventures go, it’s not too awful; I follow a river bed the whole way, giving me access to plenty of water (yes, rivers have WATER in them here), which means I don’t need to carry so much. (Water is heavy, y’all.) The route is relatively flat and low-elevation until the last couple of miles, when it rockets up 1200 feet in about two miles:
Pardon the Instagram filter.
And then I’m there.
Winter is coming.
It may shock you to hear that I’m not posting daily blog entries the whole way. If you want to see what I’m doing in detail, though, I’m basically plagiarizing the route taken by this Montana nature photographer:
Read through Parts 1 and 2, except for the side hike up to Prairie Reef, and that’s basically what I’m doing (then going back the way I came).
I’ve got a bear bell, bear spray, a SPOT personal locator, and I’m leaving a sign with my route in my car. I’ll be fine, y’all. And I’m very excited.
If all goes well (sheesh, don’t worry, it will!) then I’m back to civilization on Sunday, Sept. 18th, limping into the Hilton Garden Inn in Great Falls and passing out.
See y’all then. Don’t burn down Austin while I’m gone. No, really.
It got cold overnight. Very cold. I woke a little later than expected, partly because I’d placed my jacket over my face to keep my nose from freezing and so missed the sunrise. By 8:00 though I was out of the campground and turning onto Going-to-the-Sun Road, pretty much the only road through Glacier National Park. (This was an important thing to plan for: sometimes Going-to-the-Sun Road is closed, which means you have a 200-mile detour just to get from one side of the park to the other.)
Lake McDonald at sun-up
No such trouble this time (well, sort of). The road wound around the southern edge of Lake McDonald, then gradually started to climb into the mountains that loomed like a fortress to my east. Many, many times I’d see a view off the edge of the road and involuntarily mutter “Wow” to myself.
The mountains grew impossibly high around me—and as I got higher myself, the drop-offs below me grew impossibly deep. Not for the first time, it blew my mind that a team of engineers with balls of steel had hiked along these wild ridges and worked out the exact route that a road like this had to take. And then built it.
I’m a bit sad I missed yesterday’s show from El Rushbo, which surely included the juiciest nuggets in response to Obama’s State of the Union address. Instead he kicks off today’s show by ingratiating himself to me, describing using his iPad to watch the movie “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest.” Two points for Rush!
In the news: last week’s unemployment numbers rose sharply, continuing our slower-than-desired economic recovery. According to the AP, the crazy Snowpocalypse weather in the east contributed to the figure; according to Rush, there’s no evidence that this was the case, and the AP—liberal as ever, if you ask Rush—inserted that possible explanation to ingratiate itself to the Obama administration. I guess we’d need to check with the government analyst whom the story quotes, but Rush is simply wrong in saying that the story just made up the Snowpocalypse connection. “There’s no mention of snow anywhere in the report citing this week’s figures,” says Rush. He’s right, there isn’t; notice there’s no mention of anything. It’s just a bunch of numbers without analysis. That’s how these reports are.
Rush doesn’t let up, though. “Was there ever snow during the Bush years? Did we ever hear unemployment numbers blamed on snow during the Bush years?” Well, yeah, probably, but it’s much more compelling to blame it all on Obama. And it’s a clever rhetorical question that’s impossible to respond to without some serious news-scouring.
I think taking a day off between Rush sessions is good for my health. Need time to recuperate, so that tone of voice isn’t echoing in my brain all night as I try to sleep.
I joined a few minutes late, and I have to admit that the first thing I heard Rush say made me chuckle and nod my head: “Politics is just showbiz for the ugly.”
Not to worry, though, he got annoying quick. Rush mentions “a so-called poll—” here he effects an annoying mock laugh— “from the USA Today saying that Americans want Democrats and Republicans to work together.”
Wow, two days in a row. Is this a consistent pattern with Rush? He seems to have a genuine hypocrisy about which poll numbers he believes are credible. “We know at the end of the day [the Democrats] are going to govern against the will of the American people.”
The Friedman is Dumb
This hour’s target: New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. Rush plays, twice, a quote from Friedman concerning the Chinese president’s visit to Washington: “There’s only one thing worse than one-party autocracy—the Chinese system—and that’s one-party democracy.” Friedman’s larger point is that a majority-rule party finds things hard to accomplish if the minority party is constantly “sticking a spoke in its wheels,” whereas the rulers of an autocracy have the potential to execute their “vision.”
But first! Rush returns to the “call for civility” theme from last week, and with more force than ever: this time he calls it “censorship.” Yes, censorship.
I do not think it means what he thinks it means.
I’ve heard this before; when Glenn Beck’s ratings and sponsors started dropping after one too many wacky comment, he compared his situation with censorship. And heck, just today Sarah Palin described negative reaction to her now-infamous “blood libel” Facebook video as an attempt to “destroy the message and the messenger.”
Speaking of that video, Rush does seem to enjoy cherry-picking his poll numbers, doesn’t he? All last week I heard him cite multiple polls about Americans rejecting the notion that rhetoric contributed to the Tucson shootings. I didn’t comment on it, since I didn’t have time to check the numbers myself. But now, Rush cites another pair of polls: first, that 78% of Americans approve of how Obama handled Tucson; second, that only 30% of Americans approve of Sarah Palin on the same question. “I don’t, believe, either, number,” he announces, in his trademark slowed-for-emphasis tone. Continue reading Rush Limbaugh, Day 3→
