The past few days we continued walking though Montana’s green mountains, which are starting to turn red. The trees haven’t been completely wiped out by the mountain pine beetle yet. The berry bushes are starting to change colors. The smoke even cleared, which gave us some nice views.
Day 119 – Mile 2573.7 – Cow Pies
This morning we woke up with frost on the tent. We were happy that we swapped out our shorts in favor of pants! Thanks mom for sending a box with our warmer gear! While taking down the tent, we both managed to step in different cow pies. They were sightly frozen, so our shoes only got a little slimy. We started the day by walking under I-15 for the third time on some dirt roads. Once we got away from the interstate, we had nicely graded single track again. After the chilly morning, it ended up being a warm day. We dried out the tent and our sleeping bags at lunch. Wet/frozen tents are heavier than dry tents. We found a nice place to camp higher up tonight. We’re not down in a valley like last night, so we are hoping for no frost. Cold air seems to settle down in these Montana valleys. – R
Day 120 – Mile 2602.0 – A Baby Bear!
This morning when we woke up it was warm! Not warm like summer… But warm like not super cold, and that was very nice. We got a late start for no good reason, so we felt like we were playing catch-up all day. Fortunately we are good at playing catch-up, so we still got out miles in 😁. We were worried that we would enter a very long dry stretch of trail tonight, but when we looked closely at the comments in our map/app, we learned the app is just missing a bunch of water sources that do exist. Toward the end of the day when it was starting to get dark we heard a noise above us. We looked up and saw it was a black bear cub high in a tree. We didn’t see the mother around so we were a little bit nervous as we walked on that we would startle her, but instead we never saw her at all. The cub was our 10th bear sighting (7th black bear sighting) of the hike! When we were ready to make camp we found ourselves in a part of the forest with many fallen trees, which always makes us nervous that more could fall overnight — on us! Therefore we pushed on a bit farther than intended before finding a safe place to camp after dark. -T
Day 121 – Mile 2630.0 – Falling tree
This morning we met two northbound thruhikers at a water source. We hadn’t seen any other northbound thruhikers in 19 days! It’s been a bit lonely out here. There were a few shortcut options between Yellowstone and Butte that many people seemed to have taken, but they recently re-joined the official trail again. This afternoon/evening was pretty windy. We saw a tree fall to the ground. It was a good reminder of why we try not to camp in areas with lots of dead trees. A little after sunset we started looking for a place to camp. We were in a forest with many down trees blocking the trail. Bad timing! Eventually we found an acceptable place to camp at around dark. -R
