11 Into the Bob

The Bob Marshall Wilderness

I’m sitting in a small town America bar.  The town is Augusta MT.  To the sounds of country slide guitar and crescendoing, passionate male vocals I think about the past week.  I think about how to describe the brutal routine and discipline needed to hike 25 miles of mountainous terrain before sunset every day for the past six days.

  🎸🎵“So if you have time for a beer or maybe two 🍺 🍺 I’ll tell a short story of blisters, and tea, and how her trail name became Special Agent Sally.”

Leaving the one horse reservation town of East Glacier was sad.  Sad to say goodbye to the local people whose lives were dependent on the trade the park brought.  I took a photo of the hostel where Sally and I had stayed and we headed back onto the trail, out of the Reservation and for a while back through Glacier National Park and then onto Summit.  

At Summit we took shelter from the wind behind an obelisk, a memorial to Theodore Roosevelt who as a passionate conservationist established the National Park and Wilderness system that Sally and I were enjoying.  A couple with their grandchildren began chatting and were wowed by our ambition to make it to Mexico.

And that afternoon as we walked through our first burnout (the aftermath of a forest fire, controlled or otherwise) we entered ‘The Bob’.  The Bob Marshall Wilderness, a few hours later gave us the first opportunity to camp outside a regulated zone, ranger free and with bears 🐻 not so accustomed to humans.

It was such a laugh as we measured out 300 feet from our tent and had you been there you would have understood why they called me “Unco” (uncoordinated) at school.  We picked a branch, sixty feet high, wrapped a stone around our line and I launched that rock into the atmosphere.  It was so far off target that Sally asked if we had agreed on different trees.  Keeping it manly I got there eventually and our bear proof bags were lifted and swung in the gentle breeze.  The same gentle breeze that kept the mosquitoes at bay as we sat down for our peanut butter dinner before bed.

The days fell into a routine; rise at 5:30, empty the bear sacks, refill the backpacks and set off by 6:30.  We would hike five miles, have breakfast and usually be back hiking to lunch by 9:00.  Lunchtime at mile 15 would last an hour and would involve pasta with onion sauce, sock drying and a nap.  By using these mini hunger relieving goals we were able to maintain good discipline and pace.  It was only as the heat of the afternoon came that sore limbs, feet and general irritations would dominate each step.

For the statistic orientated, we averaged 4500’ of climb each day over twenty five miles daily for six days.  We cried ‘Hey Bear’ 1200 times.  Our calorie output was far above our intake and Sally who was the snack controller endured countless pathetic attempts from me as I craved Skittles, nuts and chocolate.

Magical moments.  There were many: passes where we napped in the afternoon carpeted with legions of alpine flowers, bobbing in the wind on their short stalks whilst eagles screeched and soared above us seeking their prey; the antics of our tramily as they goofed and laughed their way along the trail; camps on mountain passes so high we could see where we had come from and the mountains that lay ahead.

Here are some pictures of those places.

A beaver damn, near Beaver Lake

  

             Spotted Bear Pass

On our final night before we popped into Augusta for resupply we camped under the ‘Chinese Wall’.  Fossil rich limestone stretched for over 12 miles and rose 1000’ above us.  This was the divide in action, I’m sure that if you listened hard enough you could hear the older rocks being thrusted up by the younger ones, but I didn’t.  I was too tired and slept.

Chinese Wall

The final day was a mad push.  Regimental.  A bubble of maybe 20 CDT hikers had accumulated behind us and being older we were feeling the thrust from the younger hikers behind.  We were all vying for a lift at the Benchmark Trailhead to Augusta, fifty miles away on an non metalsised road.  First come, first served.  Poor, poor Sally.  We route marched on minimal breaks for 25 miles.  We did well and came in behind Zak, Droobie, Gone and Beaker.  Only Gone and Beaker grabbed a lift out with a family of hikers.  We waited, limping on our blisters as Deferred and Hamburgular joined us.

A kind retired couple with their flatbed took us some of the way but as we sat at the side of the most empty road in the US we called it a day, set up camp at a nearby site and waited for the morning.

Deflation and Elation (feelings not trail names) 

The next morning Mark, gave up time with his grandchildren and took us all to Augusta.  I rode shotgun and as we drove through natural prairie land he talked of the ranchers as we passed branded herds, the reservoir at its lowest, how Many Glacier should be renamed Just a Few Left and how frustrating it was for him as someone who wanted a better world for his grandkids to be stuck in Montucky where tobacco, guns ‘n’ beer was the hedonism of the day.

Augusta has a population of 600.  And today as luck would have it is, Rodeo Day.  The town is a buzz with Stetson and Spurs.  Hot looking Cowboys (Sally) and extremely unattractive Cowgirls wearing hideously tight jeans, bleach blond hair and checked shirts that are clearly too figure revealing 😉. They strut confidently around leading magnificent horses with lassos by their sides as they wait to enter their competitions.

Augusta Rodeo Parade

Special Agent Sally?  I was distracted for a moment.  You’ll have to ask her yourself, I’ve been sworn to secrecy.

People in the bar are starting to get a bid rowdy, I’ll need to sign off now before it gets too rooting tooting. 

 ‘See you on The Bob’ - Jugular