Trekker, a 74-year-old section hiker came by as I was setting up my tent. As we chatted, he said, “Bet I’m older than you.”
I said, “I don’t know. How are old are you?”
He proudly said, “74.”
I chuckled and told him I was 76.
He, however, would be getting his Triple Crown at the ALDHA Gathering, when he finished his section in Yellowstone. He had all his paperwork in and would finish before the deadline. I wouldn’t finish until Sept 8, after the deadline to be recognized in 2017. He could have the glory this year. Yay anyway, for all septuagenarians.
Again the sun shone red through smoky skies. For a few miles I was on a lovely plateau at about 9,400 feet, views filtered by smoke haze from Washington or Oregon fires. Cows shared the trail with me, and I talked and sang to them that I was OK, and they shouldn’t get excited. Flowers were few and dusty except for one bright patch of harebells.
Humming Bird, Merlin, OG and Starfish passed me SOBO. Hiking five miles before mid-morning snack, I reached my water cache for a late lunch. After lunch, I trail pounded on, the increasingly smoky skies preventing views into Idaho or Montana, and I reached Lemhi Pass and my car at 5:03. Good job, old lady. I drove to Dillon for my shower and steak. Leftovers would be the next day’s lunch. Bone weary, I headed for sleep.
A Steak-Sandwich SlackPack - What a Good Way To Do the Trail.
In the morning we drove from Dillon to Lima, our next base of operations. Checking into our motel, we chatted with One of Us. He wanted his picture taken with the old lady on the trail, my claim to fame.
Then we were off to a trailhead west of Monida Pass for a 7.8-mile slack pack to fill the rest of the day. I set off with my slack pack system of detachable lid from my pack as waist pack and multiple things in pockets and dangling from my belt. RockStar gingerly walked a mile on her recovering knee.
I met a group of five NOBO hikers: Treeman, J-peg, Quick Silver, Apache, and Flip Flop. Treeman was from Germany, the son of Evangelisch Pastors. (Evangelisch is a unification of Protestant groups including Lutheran and Reformed.)
Lunch was left-over steak strips in left-over dinner roll, with extra strips rolled up in a tortilla. Eating steak sandwiches while strolling along a good dirt road, my umbrella shading me from the sun, observing the rolling land before me and not carrying a pack—what a good way to hike the trail. Eventually my steak was consumed, and I resorted to serious trail pounding, walking a slack pack always easier than walking with full pack.
RockStar passed me after talking with the NOBO hikers not eager to begin their uphill climb from the trailhead. She headed back to Lima and I to my car a few miles further. On the last two-mile stretch I met Abba, Moise, and Mack. As we talked, the black sky to the north decided to become a thunderstorm. Mack got his camera out to try to catch the lightning, and I traveled on wondering if the storm would miss me. Nope. The last .8 mile I walked in thunder and lightning, rain and hail. My umbrella and rain jacket worked well, but my legs and feet got wet and beaten with wind-driven stinging hail. I was glad to reach my car.
Next up: An honest-to-goodness zero day. No driving, no walking, just cleanup, camp chores, and hanging around with other hikers. Lima is the principle civilization on Highway 15, where NOBOs and SOBOs cross past each other in their quests to complete the trail in one year. Puma, Red Bass, Sonic, Stomper, and Funny Bone were all there. Lavender had gotten off the trail, bought a bike, and was planning a bike trip to somewhere on the East Coast. There are many ways to engage in an adventure.
Rain, Hail, and Runny Cow Poo
After my rest day, RockStar and I drove out to find Bannack Pass (one letter different than Bannock Pass). Unfortunately, a wide creek about knee-deep stopped the car 2.7 miles from the pass, so I had a creek ford and 2.7 miles added to my day.
Saying good-bye to RockStar, I forded the creek and headed up the road to the pass. It rained on the way, making the dirt sticky. Even a little mud changes the weight of shoes.
The views were amazing. There were ranges yet to go over to the north, and a huge valley reminded me of South Park in Colorado. More showers fell before mid-morning snack and four more times in the afternoon. While I ate a snack sheltered slightly from the wind by a single gooseberry bush, a red tail hawk swooped within 10 feet. Past my snacking spot, the trail climbed past remarkable white chalk-like rock formations. Recalculating came toward me across open meadows, and we both commented on the beauty of the vistas. He hoped his wife could hike with him in Glacier.
Seeing threatening clouds over open meadows, I looked for a sheltered place for lunch, but didn’t find one. So I sat down in the meadow under command of my stomach. I HAD to eat.
Preparing lunch to take with me, a parade of NOBOs started with Big Sauce, Prophet, and Gentle Spirit, followed by Fainting Goat, Acorn, and Sheriff Woody. Then the rain began, and I hurriedly stuffed my food in my waist-belt pouches to eat while walking under my umbrella. Lunch Box, Save the Party, Bones, Jeremy, and Spice also passed in the wave of NOBOs.
The trail, a bit sketchy in the high meadows, alternated pleasantly with thick forest. Winding in and out of forest and meadows, I climbed higher. In spite of the rain, I enjoyed views dominated by Garfield Mountain. I pitched my tent at the edge of the forest, a meager shelter on a rainy night.
Drive On, Thor, and Scrapbook walked by me NOBO as I readied to go in the morning. They’d camped in a higher meadow and were quite wet, hoping for a dry-out spot later in the day. I had my doubts they would find one.
I steadily climbed upward through thick, wet greenery, my shoes soon re-soaked. Views still lovely and interesting, red Conglomerate Mountain had a different structure and color than the talus-covered slops of Garfield. I passed them both and made it over another pass to see valleys stretched out on the other side. Little was dry in the rain-soaked forest, but I found just enough space for me and my pack under a tree, which held off the deluge.
Going down the other side of the pass, I ran into an AmeriCorps Work Crew looking for downed trees to remove from the trail. They were from St. Louis and looked like this was all new to them. They seemed to enjoy the views if not the climb. Trail maintenance is another way to enjoy wilderness, and hikers are quite beholden to trail crews.
In the afternoon I met NOBOs Jo and Joel from London, whom I’d seen in Lima, and I stopped at the Sawmill Trailhead to hydrate my dinner. Only four more miles to go for the day, but they turned out to be wet and muddy miles with confusing or absent signs.
Although I couldn’t see them, I was following a group of equestrians. The horses were making mush of the trail in boggy areas, and I could hear protesting whinnies ahead. Apparently, horses didn’t like crossing boggy areas, and they thrashed in the soggy ground, leaving few solid hillocks for a hiker to use.
The horsey protests ahead of me sounded louder and more frantic just before I came to an especially bad boggy area. For 40-feet up and down the stream, the banks were totally churned to deep boggy mud. Searching for a place to cross, I stretched as far as I could and moved quickly on the last collapsing hummocks of grass. The mud reminded me of bogs in Maine, and my poles sank as if there were no end to the goo. I didn’t think the horses had crossed there in spite of having tried so hard. I heard one snort in the trees above me, but never saw them.
Coming to Little Beaver Creek, I found a downed sign on the ground near a river crossing. By this time it had also rained and hailed a few times, so I carefully made my way down a very slippery and steep slope to the creek and walked through. The cold stream water washed mud from my shoes.
On the other side, I found CDT markers, which led me back to cross the creek again. Huh? Maps didn’t show two crossings. What was going on? I followed the cow trail on the north bank until I was certain it wasn’t my trail, and I returned to cross the creek to the south bank yet again. I concluded I was just seeing an old and a new crossing, not two separate crossings. There was no sign of trail up the hill. I believed my GPS and we
nt up the hill anyway, eventually finding trail and cows. The cows, having eaten so much green grass, left runny, wet cow pies all over the trail. Tread briefly went missing another time or two, and as I stood under a tree and my umbrella eating a KitKat bar, I watched the ground turn white with hail. It was a miracle I didn’t fall anywhere that day to be coated with mud and fresh, nearly liquid, cow poo.
It was after 8:00 when I reached the low point on Shineburger Creek in the rain, following a hailstorm. I had to find a place to camp. The cows knew where to stand out of the wind. I could tell because every single place even slightly sheltered was recently signed with runny piles of slop. I couldn’t simply kick dry cow pies away as I’d done in New Mexico.
I finally found a not-so-level piece of short grass by a hill. That would have to do. With difficulty, I set the food bag rope on Aspen in tall, wet bushes, but didn’t use it as rain poured by the bucketful, and I was dry and eating dinner. Nope. Not going out in that again.
It had been a beautiful day until the challenges of the last four miles. The rain had taken away the smoke, and the views had been expansive. You can’t have everything. I was dry and warm in my tent and sleeping bag, and life was good even as clouds unleashed a flood on my tent.
“…out-hiked everyone my age”
The next day was a planned long and hard day, as opposed to the unplanned difficulty of the day before. Day dawned with clear skies, though the hill beside me blocked the sun from my wet tent. I walked up the valley, sometimes finding the trail, sometimes not. After wet meadows, I was glad to go uphill on a line of rocky ridges to stay out of the grass. Ridge walking on the Divide the rest of the day, I only had to be sure I was on the correct ridge.
I stopped at the top of the second large ridge top for a snack break, while I admired spectacular views in many directions. I heard them before I saw them. Elk. Big creatures, whose everyday communication sounds like electronic beeps and squeals. Looking down on one of the valleys, I saw a herd of 30 or more going over a pass on a ridge extending down from the Divide. A lovely moment to hold in memory: sitting on an open ridge with elk moving over a ridge below me.
A bit later Merlin, Hummingbird, OG, and Starfish came by. Since they were at least three times faster than I was, and I’d last seen them below Lemhi Pass, I’d anticipated seeing them again. Route finding was easy for a while; I just followed the rapidly receding figures of four hikers ahead of me.
Hikers looking at their feet on the trail see rocks. On ridges of the Divide I saw unique Easter Egg-shaped rocks, fist size to bigger than a football, black, pinkish quartz, tan and even, rarely, white. They were distinctly oval and polished like river rock. One looked like it had glacial striations. Were these tops of the Divide once river rock? Why all the distinctive oval, egg shapes? A curious question to ponder while trudging on and around them.
Passing the four SOBOs as they stopped for lunch, I told them I was hiking solo because finding similarly paced hikers was difficult for someone old and slow. Hummingbird, or maybe Starfish, said that I’d just “out-hiked everyone my age.” That had a grain of truth to it. Yet I knew other 70+-year-old hikers were out there hiking. There were just fewer of us than younger hikers. I hiked on, and several ups and downs later they passed me again, saying, "See you in Lima." They would be there at least a couple hours before me.
The ridges went on and on. Up and down and up again. Black clouds were building behind me. Bare ridge tops are not the safest places to be in thunderstorms. But ridge tops were where the trail went, so I did too. And I saw rain pour over mountains to my rear. I listened to thunder, and hoped the main storm would miss me, which it did. Thank you, God.
Only 2-3 miles from the end of my trail, I missed a turn. As I exchanged umbrella for rain jacket to break the wind raging like a hurricane at the edges of the storm, I quickly looked at Guthook and thought it indicated the next hill as the trail. In the howling wind trying to pluck me off the ridge, I made my way up that hill and followed the trail up the next hill as well to find somewhere out of fierce wind. Once out of the wind, I looked at Guthook again and discovered I wasn’t on the right trail.
Drat and horse feathers. I had to go out into the howling wind once again and retrace my steps, climbing up and down two hills. More carefully looking at Guthook on the ridge saddle, even as the wind tried to knock me over, I started down a steep, trail-less meadow. I checked Guthook several times on the way those last 2.5 miles. I was on the wrong side of a teepee-style barbed-wire fence, not an easy one to roll pack or self under with its double barbed wire strands 3-feet apart horizontally at the base. Eventually, I found a place with single vertical strands and rolled to the side that more resembled trail.
The last 2.5 miles contained many sections of extremely steep descents. I kept thinking of my face plant in Nevada on similar steepness, making me very careful, therefore even slower. It was 8:00 before I reached RockStar and her car. The last 2.5 miles that day and the last four miles the day before had been the most difficult of the year. Fourteen miles and more than 3,000-feet elevation gain plus lots of steep descent were a lot for an old lady. Getting misplaced in howling wind plus those multiple steep descents had added an extra hour onto an already challenging day.
Limitations and RockStar’s Hike
After driving back to Lima and dinner, I managed to stand up long enough for my shower before collapsing into bed. Everything hurt—feet, knees, shoulders. But I hadn’t been hit by lightning, and I did get to the car. I loved seeing the elk herd and that series of high, bare ridges overflowing with spectacular views. I thought the pain and effort worth the grandeur of the wilderness. Saying good-bye to Hummingbird, Merlin, and OG, at breakfast in Lima, the last time I would see them, we exchanged hugs and wished each other well on our respective hikes.
Then we drove from Lima to Dubois for the short section in Wyoming I’d skipped in 2014. Seeing two hikers looking for a hitch where we crossed the highway below Brooks Lake in 2014, we stowed their packs in RockStar's car and cleared the seats in mine so they could ride. Dassie was from South Africa, but lived in Switzerland. She’d started at the Mexican border in April, but she needed to get off trail and fly home to work. Mud Slide was from Missouri and planned to continue the trail after a stop in DuBois.
Their plans contributed to my musings on limitations as I sat doing my laundry. Even young, very strong hikers have limitations. Dassie's limitation was time. She had to leave the trail and go to work. Weather could be a limiting factor. SOBOs needed to get through the San Juans in Colorado before deep snow hit the high country. For NOBOs, early limitations could include lingering snow in the San Juans in spring and onset of snow in Glacier in the fall.
I, of course, had limitations regarding age and joints. Every year it was more difficult to cover enough miles in a day to make significant progress on a section of trail.
When Big Sauce passed me, he said he would like to be a section hiker, so he could take it easy and enjoy it more. No, that may not be the case. Section hikers probably work just as hard as thru hikers; some of us simply have more limitations with which to deal.
Due to my limitations: I sometimes hiked more miles off trail because I couldn’t cover as many trail miles in a day to reach usual food drops sites. I had to discover more complicated resupply arrangements to meet my limitations, sometimes walking more total miles than other hikers. Example: I had to add 2.7 miles due to a creek blocking the road. I might walk fewer miles per day at a slower speed, but thru hikers not needing to start where I did wouldn’t need to walk that particular 2.7 miles. Who worked harder? Unanswerable.
So what was I getting at?
We all have limitations of some kind or another. They differ. Life requires us to learn to deal with limitations. Adjusting expectations, accommodating limitations, and searching for creative solutions can enable reaching goals in a different way.
Advice for myself and other older hikers: Don't try to be younger, stronger hikers. They have the
ir own set of limitations. Yours are different. Discover how to adapt new methods to accomplish your goals. Take more days; arrange more food drops, even walk more miles if necessary. Adapting to limitations is an ongoing life lesson as our limitations change.
RockStar would hike the next day, and we would try to adapt to our limitations. We left my car below Highway 287 and drove RockStar's car to Union Pass, where we had bailed in 2014.
The coming eclipse had already brought scads of people. Bailing in bad weather at Union Pass in 2014, we had stood on that dirt road for nearly an hour hoping for a car. Now, some kind of vehicle passed every 5-10 minutes. We parked near a group, who had been camping near Union Pass for days, holding the area for 30 family members on their way to see the eclipse. 50,000 people were expected in Jackson and 200,000 in Casper. It was just nuts.
We only planned to go 3.9 miles after placing cars. RockStar decided her knee was feeling good enough to go. If she could complete this section, she would have bragging rights for walking all of Wyoming. It was the first time RockStar had picked up a fully loaded backpack in 2017. She was quite slow. But she was tough, and she was moving.
Lake of the Woods was pretty with a number of campers already around the lake. Lupine, fleabane and many color shades of buckwheat cheered our path. After getting water at the creek, it was RockStar's decision to walk farther for better camping.
After stopping, almost ready to snuggle into bed, two SOBOs, Governor and Somo, and one NOBO, Rabinath, from the Netherlands passed us. Rabinath came over to talk. Finding I was a pastor, he asked for a blessing. I readily complied with a prayer before he went on. We slept that night in a high, open meadow, mountains topped with snow around us, coyotes yapping nearby.
Old Lady on the Trail- Triple Crown at 76 Page 48
