Author: "Rattle" (Kylie Hardin)

We finally made it to Butte just in time for strong spring storms to blow in. The forecast showed torrential rain for the next few days, so we decided to get a ride over to Anaconda, Montana where there is a free hiker hut to stay in, and take the alternate route north from there. Once the rain died down (or so we thought), we finally stepped back on trail.

The rain kept coming. Our first night out we had a ride awakening regarding unexpected trail conditions. Invasive beetles had killed many of the lodgepole pines at elevation, leaving behind tons of deadfalls and widow makers. This made finding camp extremely difficult. Tarp camping leaves you a bit more exposed, so ideally we would set up under some sort of natural coverage, typically tree cover. But with all the dead trees, the ground being saturated, and storms blowing through it was just too risky to set up camp under the trees. This meant we had to make camp in grassy meadows, fully exposed.

We didn’t find suitable camp until around 10pm the first night, and it was incredibly sloped. I didn’t sleep very well because I kept sliding into Chris. The second day out we were exhausted but the weather mostly held up. We reached our first patch of postholing through snow so far, in a section that didn’t have many blazes to follow. This made for a slow going few miles of constantly checking our location on our phones. Once we made it through the snowy patch we started cruising and felt good about making better time than expected. We started the descent to our planned camp area and booked it downhill for a couple of miles, following what we thought were CDT blazes. At the bottom of the descent we checked our location to see how far we were from camp and realized we had taken a wrong turn, all the way back at the top! This was a tough pill to swallow, having to climb about 1000 feet with a couple bonus miles to backtrack. It’s a good thing we were making good time prior to the screw up! We still made it to camp with daylight to spare, partially due to the long days this time of year in Montana.

Day three was pretty uneventful until evening. We took an alternate route around Thunderbolt Mountain because of the forecast storms, and to avoid any more snow slowdowns. We came across a big bird (maybe a grouse?) right next to the trail that didn’t seem to be bothered by us at all. While we avoided the snow, we eventually came upon a damn obstacle course of blowdowns all over the trail. For about a mile we had to scramble over and around wet dead trees scattered about like a pile of dropped toothpicks. This would have been fun if we weren’t trying to make good time!

Once again, potential camping spots were scarce. There were comments in the FarOut app about a pond with some camping that was right around the mileage we were making that day. We got to the pond and it was not good. It was next to a dirt road, with broken glass and lumpy washed out ground. But there was a storm coming and it was getting late so we didn’t really have much choice but to pitch our tarps. Almost immediately after getting camp set up, it began to hail. And it hailed hard and heavy. I looked over to Chris’s tarp and could see him holding up the side of it against the wind. I looked around and could see the hail bouncing under the tarp and onto my quilt, and the washed out ground flooding around me. I had to act quickly to prevent my down from getting soaked and then having no way to stay warm through the night. I grabbed water bottles and rocks and whatever else I could find to prop up the edges of my tyvek ground sheet. It actually worked pretty well! Finally, after what felt like hours (but was maybe 40 minutes) the hail stopped and we were able to evaluate our circumstances. Our only choices were to try to eat a ton of food for warmth and calories and try to get some sleep, or to hike several miles down to a campsite that had pit toilets we could hole up in for the night. The pit toilets just didn’t sound appealing, and our quilts were damp but not soaked (thanks hydrophobic down!). So we made it through the night and finished the last 14 or so miles into Helena the next morning, reluctantly deciding along the way that we were going to send our tarps home and switch back to tents!