Day 23: False Info

 

We had a bit of a late start this morning because we were talking with Mama Bear and Monkey for a little while longer.

The trail followed a few trails until it hit a section of road walking as we passed under I-15. We joked how we could make it all the way home on that freeway if we just hitched.

We stopped for lunch by a creek right before a major climb. HikerBox is carrying a small reel-less fishing pole and we saw a couple trout in the creek. He set up the pole and within 2 minutes had a decent sized trout on the line!

It had swallowed the fly so we decided to cook it and eat it. HikerBox gutted and cleaned it, and we roasted it on a stick over his stove. It was good!

We did some calculations at lunch, it seemed that we had 29 miles from our spot to highway 2 where we were going to hitch into Butte. There was also I-90 freeway in 20 miles which we could possibly get a hitch too, but would be more difficult.

This section was also supposed to be all new trail within the last year or two. So we were actually pretty excited about it.

The climb was pretty tough, we soon realized that even though the map said 3.5 miles for the climb...it was much more than that. We finally got to the top and saw a new forest service sign that said it was actually 6 miles. ugh.

Next we had an 8.5 mile section of new trail to where we planned to camp at a junction. Well, the new trail wasn't very fun at all. It was excessivly twisty and took us around areas where a normal trail would have cut out 50% of it. It was almost as if the trail designers were trying to add as much trail as they could in this stretch. Maybe they got paid per mile? Who knows. It seemed like we were hiking forever and not getting anywhere. It was annoying and made us all a bit grumpy. Also, the trail was very uneven, it was up and down every 5 feet.

We left our lunch spot around 1pm....by 8pm we had still not made it to the junction where we planned to camp! We normally average about 3 miles an hour hiking, so if it was 3.5 mile climb plus the 8.5 section, we should have been there in about 4-5 hours. We just called it a day and found a spot to camp.

We did pass by a pretty cool abandoned mine along the way today. That and the fish was probably the highlight.