Alright, alright, alright—I am almost caught up. I just have
to tell you about my latest adventure to the Thorofare area this week. That was
a doozy! So my first day, I woke up at 0440, ate breakfast, and headed out to
the 9-Mile Post trailhead, all the way down east of Yellowstone Lake on the
East Entrance Road. That was quite the early morning commute, but it’s always
fun to watch the sunrise as you’re going over the Dunraven Pass.
Anyway, so I started out from the trailhead around 0730. The
general game plan is this: hike super far on Tuesday so that Wed. is easier,
move camp on Wednesday and explore Eagle Peak, hike out on Thursday. Great.
Everybody that’s been following along the past two years knows by now that my
backpacking trips never go as planned and something super random always happens
to screw me up. Well honestly, that didn’t really happen this time…some minor
glitches, but nothing huge that threw me completely off.
My first mistake was always forgetting that backpacks weigh
more than daypacks and really decrease your energy level throughout the day. It
never ceases to amaze me how I always overlook this. Game plan for Tuesday was
to hike 27.0 miles…I got tired and grumpy after a little over 20 of those. :)
My pace went from normal to slower than normal to slow to a drunken stumble to
a rejuvenated two miles after hitting the Mountain Creek trail junction back to
a drunken stumble for the last half a mile. (Side note: no alcohol was
involved—it’s just a metaphor.) I was definitely having type two fun by the end
of the day.
But anyways, the first part of the Thorofare Trail goes
through a 2003 fire area and is super duper flat. In fact, almost my entire
journey besides up and down Eagle Pass was super flat. Made it a bit easier! I
stopped in the Park Point area for fun and to take a second breakfast break. I
then discovered that on Groundwork Park Tour, my camera had gotten too cold and
was no longer working, including my spare camera batteries that I always carry
with me. Great. So I used my phone to take pictures. It was on airplane mode
and ultra power saving mode…so it can usually last about a week that way. I
wasn’t too concerned, just sad that I had been dumb enough to let the batteries
get cold.
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| Yellowstone Lake from along the Thorofare Trail |
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| Yellowstone Lake from along the Thorofare Trail |
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| Yellowstone Lake from along the Thorofare Trail |
Blah blah blah, I meandered down the trail some more, passed
lots of different people, including a giant stock team. They were out of
Gardiner and had a bunch of visitors that they were taking on a 6-day trip
around the lake and over to Heart Lake. Cool beans. I also encountered a dumb
bison on the trail that wouldn’t move. He just stayed there and occasionally
took a step forward. So I had to go off into the thick trees to try to go
around him and get back on the trail. Stupid thing.
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| dumb bison along the Thorofare |
It honestly wasn’t a very eventful day. It was just me,
hiking on a super long trail by myself. Waiting for what felt like eternity to
get to the Mountain Creek trail junction so I could turn left and only have 2.4
more miles to go to get to my campsite for the night (6D5). Oh, and when you’re
hiking by yourself, your brain does this really cool thing where it plays
tricks on you and instead of the fun game called “bear, bison, or boulder”
where you guess what the object you see is—your brain imagines that every
stupid rock, tree, fallen log, tree stump, tree roots, bird, and brown foliage
is instead a bear. So you hike along and you’re super tense because you’re so
hyperattentive. It’s awful. Really freaks you out all the time. I’m going to
partially blame this on the guy in the central backcountry office who told me
before I came that a couple weeks ago they had to scatter mule remains in the
Mountain Creek trail area, so I should be aware that the grizzly threat was
higher due to a carcass presence. (He also said that by the time I got there,
it wouldn’t be as much of a problem…but still.) Oh, I did see an interesting
animal that I don’t usually see too often—a porcupine!
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| Porcupine along the Mountain Creek Trail...scared me to death |
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| Yellowstone River along the Thorofare |
I lied when I said it wasn’t a very eventful day. Sort of.
Kind of. In a way. See, it wasn’t an eventful day in the sense that anything
catastrophic happened. It WAS an eventful day in the sense that I reached my
500-mile goal for the season. :D The people in the employee rec office don’t
think that anyone’s ever completed 500 miles in one season before, so my new
claim to fame is that I’m unofficially the first person to join the lifetime
500-Miler Club in one season in Yellowstone!
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Trail junction after I finished mile #500 (and 501, 502, ...).
Currently 7.4 miles away from the most remote point in the lower 48 states! |
Finally got to 6D5 at 7:30, checked in with 700, ate supper,
put up my tent, hung my food in my bear hang, and went to bed. Before I get to
the next big event of the day, I need to take time to thank Schmitty, one of my
supervisors, for caring so much about his staff. He and Alicia are great—they
really are—not only at their jobs, but about how much they truly take care of
all of their employees. When Schmitty learned (on Monday night) that I was
leaving early the next morning and, in the commotion of the weekend, I hadn’t
filled out a backcountry report with 700 yet—he did it for me the next morning
and put himself down as my emergency contact so that he’d be the first person
to know if something was wrong or I missed a check-in. (Backcountry check-ins
are at 0700 and 1900, whether you’re there for work or personal time.) He also
told me to take anything I wanted from the gear cache (he knows I’ll bring it
back in good shape), and is just genuinely a good person—even though sometimes
you have to dig pretty far down under his tough guy shell. Whatever, I know it
doesn’t sound like much, but I appreciated it more than I can explain.
So then, as I’m lying in my tent a little before 2100, I
hear all this crashing through the bushes and super interesting breathing as a
bear clumsily clambers around my campsite. Ever hear a bear right outside your
tent? Well I have now. There were tracks in the morning. Holy crap was that
awful. I may or may not have been extremely frightened and just kept telling
myself to go to sleep. Yeah right.
^Side note: Dylan (bear management team, fellow EMT) had me fill out a bear report when we were on our way back from Livingston super early on Friday morning. He carries them in his pocket. Convenient.
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| My nice little Big Agnes Seedhouse SL1 at 6D5 |
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| Bear hang done with a pulley and two pieces of paracord...a bit of overkill for the amount of food I had |
Some notes about things that I packed:
--I borrowed a sleeping bag from the gear cache because it
packs down smaller and is lighter than mine, yet still rated for 20°F. Bull crap. Maybe it’s
just seen too much use, but I froze my butt off because I left my pants back at
the YCC, so I was curled up in the bottom of my sleeping bag in the fetal
position all night. No bueno.
--My coworkers were astonished when they saw me in the
kitchen packing my food. I don’t take very much food. They thought I was going
to starve. I came back with extra food that I didn’t eat. (If you know me at
all, you know that I eat an absolute ton—just not while backpacking.) So here’s
what I took:
--3
pb&js—T/W/R lunch
--2
pop tarts—W/R breakfast
--2
Clif bars—T/W supper
--8
granola bars—T/W/R 2nd breakfast, T/W/R lunch, 2 as needed
--2
cups of trail mix—T/W supper
…I had extra granola bars and extra trail mix that I didn’t
eat.
--If you’re using an MSR hand pump to filter your water,
I’ve found that it takes 180-190 pumps per liter of water to fill a Nalgene.
Fun fact.
--If you don’t have very much food/smellies to put in your
bear hang, you can probably just bring along some paracord so that you don’t
have to bring a pulley and two lines of paracord. That’s what Sam and I did in
Glacier. That’s what I made the mistake of not doing here.
Moving on to Wednesday…I was hoping by hiking so far the
previous day that I’d set myself up for success on Wednesday, but I severely
underestimated how tired I’d be. Wow! I didn’t get camp packed and leave until
0845, so I didn’t get to 6D8 (my next campsite) until 1130. Crazy, by lunch the
day before, I’d driven 2+ hours and hiked 11.5 miles. Wednesday by lunch I’d
checked in with 700, took camp down, filtered 3L of water, hiked 5.6 miles, and
set camp back up. Far less productive.
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Sunrise from my tent at 6D5
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| Turret Mountain and Table Mountain (behind) |
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| Howell Creek from the Mountain Creek Trail |
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| Funky Howell Fork Patrol Cabin at the Mountain Creek/Dike Creek junction |
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| Meadow area at 6D8 |
So after lunch, I went off to explore the Eagle Peak area
after unloading as many things from my pack as I could at my campsite. Eagle
Peak is the tallest peak in the park at 11,372 ft. It’s not often summitted
because of its shear difficulty and remote location. That being said, I went in
with zero expectations and really just wanted to see what I could see. So I
headed up to Eagle Pass, which was two miles from my campsite, and planned to
just follow the ridgeline over as far as I could. There were some visible
tricky spots that looked pretty steep, so I decided to just analyze as I went.
First of all, let me just say that Eagle Pass is absolutely beautiful. That
view is gorgeous! NPS territory is south and west and Shoshone National
Forest/Washakie Wilderness Area is north and east. You can see below the ideal
yellow path to the top of Eagle Peak from the pass. You can also see a purple
path. The purple path was me. As the old adage goes, “When thunder roars, go
indoors.” …which becomes, just don’t be on peaks or ridges above everything
else right now Bethany. So being a safety-first person as often as I can
be—storms, stamina, and general safety kept me from going any further. (I’d
already fallen once. Whoops.) On that note, I’m becoming a believer in trekking
poles for mountain purposes. My makeshift hiking sticks were very useful until
one broke during my fall. Whether that was a cause or effect remains unclear…
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| Flowers between 6D8 and Eagle Pass |
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again—shuffle has an
uncanny ability to play certain songs at the most interesting times. For
example, Tuesday when I was getting mopey because I hadn’t hit the Mountain
Creek trail junction yet and I was tired, on came “Go the Distance” from
Hercules followed by “Never Surrender” by Corey Hart. Ha! Then Wednesday, as I
was clumsily clambering down, right as I decided to turn around because of the
weather, “Send Me an Angel” came on. Crazy stuff right there!
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| Clouds rolling in over Eagle Peak |
I got back to camp a little before 1600, and since it hadn’t
started downpouring yet, I filtered all of my water for Thursday. Then I went
to sit inside my tent as it started pouring. Hurray. I went to bed at 1730,
woke up a little before 1900—perfect to check-in with 700, ate a Clif bar,
brushed my teeth, and went back to sleep. :)
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| What do you do when it's pouring outside and you're by yourself? Go to bed at 5:30. |
Thursday I had everything packed up and was headed out of my
campsite around 0730 so I could get a decent start to the day. It’s really hard
to convince yourself to get out of your sleeping bag and out of your tent in
the morning when it’s cold. No me gusta. Watching the sun come up over the
mountains from the pass was really cool though, so that was great to
experience!
So I set a 1530 goal for myself to get back to the trailhead
at the Eagle Creek Campground along Highway 20 and I continued along. I passed
an NPS trail crew that was headed over the pass to work on the NPS side (south
side) of Eagle Pass. Captain Underpants was not kidding when he said my feet
would not stay dry the rest of the day. It was absolutely insane how many water
crossings there were and how muddy and wet the trail was. I probably forded two
dozen streams—at least. Some of those were upper thigh level and I couldn’t see
the bottom. Definitely not my favorite kind of ford. I often found sticks along
the bank to use as poles to help myself across. Three or four points of contact
with those slippery rocks is better than two.
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| Along the Eagle Creek Trail (USFS land) |
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Here's an excellent example of when trail work is needed.
A waterbar would do wonders so that the water running onto the trail doesn't also run down the trail.
This was one of oh so many places that the trail was covered in either water or mud. |
Oh, another interesting things happened on Thursday. My
phone (on airplane mode and ultra power saving mode) was at 65% battery with
42ish hours of life left remaining. All of a sudden, I hear it double
vibrate—which normally means I have a text message, except that it’s on
airplane mode so that can’t be it. No, instead my phone says that it has 0%
battery and needs to be plugged into a charger. Then it turns off. What the
heck? It was fine three seconds ago when I pulled it out at the top of the pass
to take a picture. It’s a mystery.
So I did manage to get to Eagle Creek Campground at 1530
pretty much on the dot. I had yet another river to ford when I got there, and
this one was much wider than all the rest of them that day. It wasn’t quite as
deep, but it was definitely wide. Then it took me about half an hour, but I
hitchhiked back through the East Entrance to my car at the Nine Mile Post
trailhead. These two guys named Luke and Sam picked me up in their van that
they were traveling across the country in, visiting every national park in the
continental U.S. They were on their last couple weeks of their trip, so they
had been to most of them already. Neat people. Then, as tradition dictates, I
got ice cream to conclude my backpacking trip. :D
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| Peanut Butter Chip ice cream from the Fishing Bridge General Store--arguably the most important component of the trip ;) |
…because I leave next Friday afternoon after work, that was
the last hike I’ll do in Yellowstone. Sad pandas, but I enjoyed it while it
lasted…
Final Mileage Count: 536.3
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