The vegetation covers everything. Green Alders encroach asphalt pavement, forcing two lane roads to diet. What once passed for Jeep trails has morphed into hard-packed single track surrounded by wildflowers. Yet, somehow, the single track has been kept immaculate. No doubt maintained by Montana’s ambitious trail crews willing to take on the Sisyphusian task of cutting back rampant vegetation, seemingly making tree cuts at a pace I doubt someone caricaturizing a lumberjack could imagine.
Short update
• So much wetness. It takes days for the vegetation to dry out after a rain
• I’m done with Montana and in Idaho for a few days of hiking
• Feeling good and am taking a zero in Bonners Ferry (so am contactable today and tomorrow)
Long update
The Continental Divide is that razor’s edge that splits America’s waterways in two. One drop of rain willl shortly take on a seemingly quantum property landing directly on the divide and either rolling toward the Atlantic Ocean or its West Coast sibling. The PNT is theoretically the journey of that raindrop, with its humble beginnings in Glacier National Park and its narrated, animal-friendship journey to the Pacific Ocean.
Yet for how wet my feet have been, no raindrop is ever taking *this* path. The trail goes against the grain of the mountains. There have not been long, lovely ridge walks; the hiking I enjoy most when heading North or South across the Rockies. I’ve been traversing through dense forest, gaining 2,600 feet to a saddle obscured in lodgepole pine and mosquitos. Occasionally I’ve greeted a fire lookout, and mosquitos, before plunging that same distance down again, mile after mile, gradually moving West with the migrating herd of mosquitoes. Although I’ve lamented that my photos of mountains have started to look the same, I find myself longing for those particular exposures compared to this rolling green shroud.
But for all the monotony, the hiking has been pleasant. I left Polebridge after having breakfast (lunch? Maybe second breakfast?) with another PNT hiker. We shot-the-shit for a bit, and it appeared likely we would be running into each other for many hundreds of miles. He took an alternate route into Eureka, however, and I’m zeroing in Bonners. Our roads appear to be like Robert Frost and so too will diverge.
I had 4 glorious days of sun out of Polebridge and into Eureka, a town that traces its heritage to logging of Christmas trees — not so similar to all other towns that share that name. Oh, but also mining. As the mining operations on the US side of the border curtailed, Eureka’s population moved on to the occupation of retail trade in the Tobacco Valley (named as such because the native Kootenai used the plentiful water resources to grow their variety of local tobacco).
After a quick shower, laundry, and a town feast, I walked out of Eureka along the Tobacco River, a river flowing into the beautifully named Koocanusa Lake (reservoir). This is a wordsmush between the Kootenai Indians, which the Tobacco Valley denizens displaced from their native lands many years ago, and the shared lake asset between Canada and the USA. While mining operations on the US side of the lake are mostly of a bygone era, the Canadian side of the lake continues to wage war against the Kootenai inhabitants that remain. The coal mining operations in Canada have been discharging seleneium from their mines into the lake at a concetration not only magnitudes in excess of all environmental laws, but high enough to cause ample fish die off and mutation, destroying the once viable fishing way of life for the natives.
Never fear, though, the lake really is quite beautiful, selenium and all! As I neared the southern edge of the lake, I went into the “town” of Rexford for dinner, which was also when a storm took over.
Hoping to not setup my tarp in the miserable rain, I asked if the bar I was dining at would let me sleep on their back porch. But, in the truly all-American pastime of fearing litigation, they decided they couldn’t take on that liability, opting to push me into the rain. I found a lull in the storm and stayed mostly dry.
And then I was wet for the next 2 days of hiking. By the end of the third day, I had dried out on top of a beautiful ridge (this ridge was an alternate route to the normal trail). I scrambled down the ridge and back to wet feet, and eventually back in time to the Pacific timezone and a sudden ampleness of glorious huckleberries and thimble berries. Goodbye for now, Montana.
May all our feet remain dry in Idaho,
Jeff