CDT Days 110-112 – Fire Detour

This section of the “trail” had us walking a fire detour around the Trail Creek and Black Mountain fires. We were almost entirely on paved or gravel roads walking through the Big Hole Valley. We enjoyed the scenery, and the people we met were all super friendly!

Day 110 – Northeast of Mile 2296.0 – Bannick State Park

We have been eating Malt-o-meal for breakfast for the last several days. We found a box of it in a hiker box in Leadore and decided to try it out. (A hiker box is where hikers leave things they don’t want behind for other hikers to take if they’d like.) It tastes fine at home, but it is nasty out here! Maybe we don’t have enough sugar in it or maybe I keep burning it, but it isn’t fun to wake up to that stuff… At least our instant coffee is as good as ever. After our Malt-o-meal start we hiked a gravel road toward Bannick State Park where we were hoping to pick up snacks and more coffee. Passing civilization is one of the perks of road walking on a detour! When we arrived at the park boundary we realized the visitor center with the shop was a mile into the park. Right when we decided a 2 mile detour wasn’t worth it just for a few treats, a truck pulled up and offered us a ride! The driver was named Tony, and he had been out pronghorn hunting. He drove us into the park, we enjoyed two coffees and several snacks each, and when we were ready to leave he happened to be leaving too so he drove us right back to where he had picked us up. If you’re reading this, thanks Tony! The rest of the day wasn’t too eventful. We walked down a busy highway (Montana 278) for about 20 more miles and took very few breaks. At the end of the day we found a nice campsite up the hill from the highway, but we can still hear the sound of the cars driving by. Despite being below the mountains and near a highway, Montana is beautiful! The valleys are massive and the mountains tower above us very impressively. I like it here. -T

Day 111 – East of Mile 2345.0 – Jackson & Wisdom, MT

We woke up to a bit of rain on the tent, but we didn’t let it slow us down because we had two goals for the day. The first was to make it just under 8 miles to Jackson by 9 am when the cafe opened. The rain had stopped when we started the easy road walk towards town. We saw a coyote! We made it before 9 am, but it turned out the cafe didn’t open until 11 am. Luckily there was a bar open. We enjoyed coffee, hash browns, and toast. We didn’t stay too long though because our second goal was to make it 18 more miles to Wisdom with enough time to shop before the grocery store closed. We had another easy road walk between the two towns, but it had started raining again. Walking on a paved highway in the rain was not super fun, but after a couple of hours the rain stopped. We saw hundreds of bails of hay and plenty of cattle. We made it to Wisdom just before 5 pm with plenty of time to get our resupply shopping done. We were hoping for showers and laundry too, but we’ll have to wait until our next stop in Butte. Instead we went out for pizza. Everyone in both towns was super nice. Even though we had to walk a paved highway all day, we had a great time.

Day 112 – Mile 2392.9 – Back on the CDT!

Continuing the fire detour we have been in for several days, we spent a short time on paved roads this morning and then a long time on gravel roads. While walking we had enough service to look up giant ramps we keep seeing in many of the fields that somebody told us are called “Beaver Slides”. It turns out they are giant hay stacking devices that were invented in this area over 100 years ago. They are pretty neat — because it is so cold here in the winter cattle need a lot of hay, but because it is so dry here in the summer it doesn’t need to be covered. So, instead of hay bale’s they make giant mounds of hay that are rumoured to last 5-6 years before spoiling. Cool! Eventually we made it past the fields to a forest. The forest was thick with pines, which was a strange sight because for much of this trail so far most of the pines were dead — bark beetles got them. Hopefully we’ll have many pines ahead. Finally we left the gravel road for a single-track trail, and after a long climb we re-joined the CDT. Woohoo! We celebrated being back on the trail and doing town efficiently by calling it a night a bit early — we set up camp at 7:30 and enjoyed about an hour of daylight before bed. Woohoo! -T