well, I fell off the blogging wagon this section. We hiked 13 hour days every day except for the day we left Darby, and the day we got into Leadore. Just wasn’t any energy for blogging at the end of the day. I plan to get back into the groove in this next section.
It was an unbelievably beautiful section, largely directly on the Divide, starting with the very first day out of Darby. There were many, many steep ups and downs. Long, long days. Sunshine punctuated with intermittent, intense, brief thunder and hailstorms. I saw three huge elk bucks with their fuzzy antlers in the twilight at Slag-a-melt lake, and swore quietly as I mistyped my iPod password to access my camera and they bounded gracefully away. We met up with the Swiss couple, Patrick and Janine, at Slag-a-melt Lake, and saw them on and off for the rest of the section. On the second day out of Darby, Scalliwag and I were having some sort of an involved conversation and accidentally wandered up a jeep road, off trail, and ended up doing a 1000 vertical foot scramble down some really steep scree to get back to the trail. Fun, but it ate up a lot of energy. We got into Leadore, Idaho yesterday, day 38 of the hike for me and Veggie. Sam, the owner of the four-room Leadore Inn, was kind enough to pick us up at Bannock Pass, which would have been a really hard hitch. We crammed four hikers into a room with not quite enough beds; the Swiss couple had a connecting room with a kitchenette. Janine and I made a birthday cake for Scalliwag’s 30th Birthday. Amazingly, you can make a box cake that comes out almost completely normally by microwaving it for 8 minutes. Today we are just relaxing, eating, and hanging out in this tiny town. I am starting to look forward to the end of Montana and the beginning of Wyoming, which is coming up soon.
Comments