We have finally hit the trail! Today was a crazy day.
Heather and I woke up early to get to the ranger station when it opened. We had to go through a long process of picking campsites the entire way through Glacier. The hard part was that some of the camps that we wanted were full. So we had to find alternates. We have one camp in a few days that is actually 5 miles off the CDT. It is a bummer, but we will make it work.
After getting breakfast and packing up our stuff, we drove to the Swiftcurrent Inn that was down the road to drop off a box of food. We will be back to Many Glacier on our second night.
As we were heading out of Many Glacier we ended up giving a ride to 2 CDT thru-hikers who were hitchhiking to the start. They had started in New Mexico a couple months ago but were "flipping" to go southbound.
As with the PCT, the majority of hikers go northbound (Nobos) and will start in April. While only a dozen or two will go southbound. This year, the Nobos were all stopped in their tracks when Colorado got hit with massive snow storms in May. Due to deep snow and crazy avalanche danger, almost all Nobos have decided to "flip" up to the northern terminus and start hiking south bound. The snow in Glacier is 70% of average while Colorado is 200%. They will then finish their hike where they got off trail.
This is awesome for Heather and I. Our trail community of thru-hikers has gone from ~20 to ~70.
We got to the border and it starting raining. The 2 CDT hikers had 4 other hikers waiting for them there. The 6 of them got some pictures and started down the trail. Heather and I got our stuff packed up and did our own photoshoot.
We said goodbye to our parents and started walking.
It was raining pretty good, I'm so glad I brought a trekking umbrella with me this time! It is MUCH more pleasant than hiking with just a rain jacket. It even kept my backpack dry.
The trail was very muddy and a steep downhill, we joked that we could probably sit down and slide the whole way into the valley.
A few miles in we caught the group of thru-hikers. It was nice hiking with the whole group. The rain was on and off all day.
Even though it was cloudy, the scenery was insane! Glacier has blown me away, and we still have another 60 miles of it.
We split from the group at our camp on Elizabeth lake. They continued on a side trail to a different campsite.
There are a number of other hikers here and we had a good time hanging out with them.
Interesting to hear about the flippers. I am glad it will improve your trail safety with da bears. With all those extra people, you could split a two-four. That's Canadian for 24-pk of beer. That joke would have gone over better when you were still in Canada, eh?
ReplyDeleteMy other Canadian comments on Day 0 didn't go through for whatever reason. Probably for the better. Welcome back to America, buddy.