Continental Divide Trail – southbound

For ‘business reasons’, I find myself out of work, with a long list of projects here at home, and an unfinished long distance trail map on my wall.  I’m heading back out to the Continental Divide Trail this summer.   The timing did not work out perfectly, so it was too late to start in Mexico.  The NM ‘bootheel’ section is hot in late April, by mid-late May it’s a furnace.

You’re unemployed, and it summer time.  What do you do?  Go hiking.

Where

The trail ends in 2 places on the Montana/Canada border, a lake in the middle of nowhere called Waterton Lake, and right next to the Chief Mountain border crossing on Rt 6, in Glacier National Park.   Most northbound hikers choose to end at the Waterton Lake terminus.  In the past, you could simply walk over the border and contact Canadian Border Services Agency from a payphone located some miles away in a provincial park.   This might still be true, who can say with the weird border controversies these days?   There are two problems with trying to start there if you’re heading south.  1) there’s no good way to get there, it’s about a 2.5 day hike from the Chief Mountain end (which you can reach by hitch hiking), and 2) more importantly, you have to cross the Ahern Drift, a snow slide on a steep pass with little to no runout (nothing to catch you), AND it famously melts out late.

Which means you need spikes and an axe, to make a roughly 5 day round trip hike, just to tag the Waterton terminus.   I’m checking on the snow reports daily.  I might end up bringing my spikes anyway.   A lot of the trails go along lakeshores, but you cross several high passes, which will probably be snowy still.

It’s Chief Mountain for me.   My plan, so far, is to get to East Glacier village on or around June 13.   Then there’s a shuttle bus to the ranger station at Two Medicine, where I’ll try and find a walk-up permit for my whole hike.   There’s no backcountry camping in the park, you have to stay in the designated sites.   Just like the Wonderland Trail in Mt. Rainier National Park.  AND, because I missed the March 1 window for online permits (because I was busy, you know, WORKING), I don’t have one in advance.  I might not even get a permit for the whole CDT section in the park.   We’ll see.

How

This will be a tougher hike, on par with some of the Appalachian Trail stuff I did in Maine.    The Park isn’t so bad, every few days there’s a road, I’m shipping a bunch of food there, and there’s a couple of decent backpacker places to stay in East Glacier.   The real challenge will begin south of there, the trail enters the Bob Marshall Wilderness.  It’s 176 miles from highway 2, to a hamlet called Lincoln, MT.    The Bob, as they call it, is also home to innumerable “blowdowns”, which are trees felled by winter storms lying across the trail.  Given cuts to the US Forest Service, many of them remain uncleared.   It’s a scramble.

Plus, Montana is brown bear country, and they are not the gentle giants of the East coast.   They’re badass.   So you have to have a bear can, which weighs over 2.5 lbs.    And you need bear spray, which weighs another 11 ounces. 

When dealing with bears, remember the old rhyme:

If it’s brown, lay down.

If it’s black, fight back.

If it’s white, goodnight.

Given the early nature of this section and my lack of “trail legs”, I’m banking on 9 days of food.  Which weighs around 18 lbs.   At least there’s plenty (too much?) of water.

What’s hilarious is that with my new baseweight of about 19 lbs (yech) plus the 9 day food carry, and throwing in some water, I’m going to max out at about 40 lbs.  Which is 5lb less than I started my northbound AT hike with, and 30 lb less than I started my southbound AT hike!   Of course back then my ‘big 4’ (pack, bag, pad, tent) was 20 lbs alone, so you can see the difference 30 years makes in the world of materials science.

Thoughts

It’s tough not having a solid plan.   Everything I do, basically, has a plan.  If you’ve worked with me, or lived with me, you know what I’m talking about.  This will be like like swimming out past the breakers at a beach, or … some other kind of thing where you’re off the edge of the map.   But, people do this all the time.

So the whole thing is going to be a big deal.   I’m excited for it though.   After this is more of the Montana cow country, a jaunt into Idaho, then Yellowstone, then the Wind River Range in WY, followed up, finally, by the San Juan mountain range in CO (which I skipped due to COVID).

Feel free to dig up your old donation promises and continue to donate per mile as I walk south; I’m not tracking that this time – it was too much work and honestly distracted me from the hike.

Happy Trails y’all.