Day 7
14.5 miles
We got moving around 9:30 from the motel, after having breakfast at a fancy bakery in Jackson. Jackson is a bit jarring to me-it caters heavily to tourists and the wealthy, and I feel a bit lost in the fray. We walked to the edge of town and back up the Cache Creek trail, sweating under heavy backpacks with new resupplies. We took the North Fork Horse Creek trail and then the Horse Creek trail south through the Gros Ventre Wilderness. The forest is alight in midsummer, with every shade of green and a million sounds of birds and insects. After the Cache Creek trail, popular with cyclists, we saw no one for the rest of the day. The trail meandered down the creek, crossing it many times, a cool dip for the feet (not great for blisters, though.). Around 6 pm we ducked into the forest before the start of some private property. There are many ranches and corrals in this area.
Day 8
20.4 miles
We left our little wooded campsite at 7:40-a little late-and started the walk along the roads threading through the ranches down towards the highway. We were crossing a large field with high grass when we saw what we thought was a large dog, bounding our way, with pointy ears. It stopped when it saw us and took off the other direction. A few minutes later we heard high pitched howls-that was a coyote. We walked about a mile down the highway, crossed, and had lunch under a tree at the Hoback River-filtered some water, which didn’t taste very good. Probably lots of agricultural runoff. It was really hot and sunny. We wound our way up the roads to the Willow Spring trailhead and climbed up away from the ranches-about 3 horsepacking groups passed us. We finally connected with the Wyoming Range National Recreation Trail, which will take us all the way to Pickle Pass. Alex had designed the route as a big “U” in this section through the Wyoming and Grayback ranges, but we are redesigning the route piece by piece to accommodate our group’s skill and comfort level. We made this section a skinnier “U” using the Wyoming trail, which so far is working great. The Gros Ventre wilderness is wonderfully remote and wild, green with midsummer and heavy with the perfume of flowers and life unbothered. We camped next to Willow Creek, right on the bank. I’ll listen to the Creek as I sleep.
Day 9
16.4 miles
Today was a mentally challenging day. It started raining sometime in the night and was pouring by the time we got up. We packed up our wet, muddy tents and headed up the Wyoming Range NRT. As we crested Pickle Pass, about 1 pm, thunder rumbled, and I joked, “…..camp here?” We followed the ridge of the Greyback Range for the rest of the day, heading back north towards Hoback Junction, in mist and cold rain, slipping on the steep climb in slick grey mud. One of those days when you question your life decisions. However, in the evening we came upon a lovely camp in a grove of trees, and decided to camp a little early at 6:40 pm. The clouds lifted and revealed incredible views of the Gros Ventre range. It made the day seem a little better.
Day 10
18 miles
We got moving at 6:30 am, a little earlier than usual. The morning was sunny but the trail was really tough to find for awhile on the Greyback crest. We did a lot of slip-sliding in dew-covered plants down steep slopes. Exhausting and slow. Then around Pow Wow Point, beautiful trail materialized which ran the ridge north all the way to Hoback Junction. Jukebox and I got there about 3:30pm. We got a few extra supplies at the Hoback Market, and I got a “small” (12 oz) of their signature “Sloshie”, which is like a 7-11 Slushie, but with alcohol. It was very alcoholic, I definitely could only handle a “small”, and can’t believe there was a medium, large, and extra large option. We started hiking again once it got cooler at about 6 pm, walked the highway for a mile, then scrambled up a very steep slope onto a good trail which turned into a dirt road. An evening thunderstorm passed over us and got us a little wet, and we found a really nice camping spot next to Fall Creek. 34 miles to Jackson round 2.
Day 11
15 miles (~11 on route)
Well, this was one of those absurdly bad days that sometimes happen on a thruhike. We started hiking at 7 am, nice and speedy on the dirt roads. We turned up Fall Creek and followed it for a few miles on excellent trail. At about 10:30, we reached the point where Alex’s Route bushwhacked you the side of a ridge steeply to join a trail on top of the ridge. We pondered staying on the creek trail, which was a mile shorter and would be faster and have nice water all day-then decided to stay true to the route. That was a mistake for us. We bushwhacked straight up the ridge through really thick forest with a million fallen trees in various stages of decay-really a pain and exhausting. When we got on top, we spent some time trying to find the trail, trail 50-turns out this was one of those trails that maybe used to exist but is long gone. No problem on grassy meadow, but the route turned into a forest with just an impossible number of blow downs and thick brush-absolutely awful, and it would be like that for 9 miles. We decided it would actually be better to just go back down to the creek and use the first trail we found. We slowly made our way back down the ridge, over a million fallen trees, a lot of stinging nettle, and around a couple of swamps. Then we couldn’t find the trail for awhile…when all was said and done it was 1:30 and we hadn’t moved at all in terms of the route. We found the trail and made our way up it, only to have it disappear from time to time. We spent 45 minutes taking the wrong trail straight up the ridge to a beautiful meadow that promptly dead ended, and we had to retrace our steps. We finally stopped exhausted at 7 o’clock, 2 miles below the ridge, 23 miles from Jackson. What a dumb day. Hopefully tomorrow is better. This is, of course, the great challenge of this thing-it’s been hiked once by its creator, the other direction. So there are a lot of unknowns. Some of the trails on the USGS topo are in great shape, because they are used by horseback riders and occasionally hikers. Others haven’t been maintained in decades.
Day 12
15 miles
Day 2 of the Hoback Sufferfest. We got moving a little after 7 am, following the faint trail through a huge field with head-high weeds and wildflowers. We started to ascend and the trail all but disappeared. Stargate veered off on a different faint path, up a different gully, and we lost site of him. We wouldn’t see him again that day. We finally ran into the “trail”, Trail 50 on the USGS topos, which was very, very faint but gave us a pathway through the various stream gullies we had to cross, traversing along the ridge. It was incredibly beautiful, with wildflowers and sunshine. We were passing a small copse of trees and we both heard a loud snort-I said “Hey, Bear”, and took the safety off my bear spray-didn’t see any animal, but a little while later we passed another cluster of trees and a large stag with full antlers bounded gracefully away-first one was probably a deer too. We decided to just walk steeply up to the ridgeline when the topo lines on the map were the widest-this route requires constant critical thinking, by the way. Up on the ridge the walking was a little faster and the views of course magnificent-the Gros Ventres we had walked through behind us, and the Grand Teton in front of us with Jackson town twinkling below. Then the crux of the day happened-Trail 50, and Alex’s Route, dumped off the ridge to the west on a series of switchbacks down a steep slope into a valley. And we just could not find that turnoff-it probably used to exist but the mountain had reclaimed the trail in that place long ago. We looked back and forth on the ridge for about 45 minutes and then decided to just carefully work our way down the steep slope. It was literally one step at a time, replant the trekking poles, then another step down-frustrating and exhausting. It took us 45 minutes to get down about 1000 horizontal feet. Every color of wildflower nodded around us on this sideways slope as we picked our way down at an achingly slow pace, every muscle in our legs and shoulders contracting to stay upright. The angle finally lessened and we made our way through suddenly nice trail down a little farther-sailing along for a mile or so-when I thought to myself, “trail 50 has never been this good before…” and out of the corner of my eye I see, down and to my left, faint switchbacks about 200 vertical feet below us, down a steep hill. that’s where we’re supposed to be. Sigh. More bushwhacking. We made it down to the “real” trail, then followed it all the way to its end, becoming wider and more used as we descended, now with hoof prints and horse droppings-the horse packers come up here, cool. In this area, It seems like basically if the horseback riders use the trails, they stay intact-otherwise, they disappear as the mountains reclaim the land that is theirs-torrential rains wash out, high snows crush and degrade, flowers and weeds grow in abundance. These are wild mountains, untamed by very much human impact, and you see and feel it as you travel through its sacred wild grounds, one little shaky footstep at a time.
It was Friday, 6 pm. We had 13 miles of Alex’s route to the trailhead to get to Jackson. I found us an alternate that I thought would get us out a little faster, continuing in Trail 51 easternly along the Big Elk Creek to a series of dirt roads-fast walking, maybe a hitch. Jukebox was extremely and understandably trepidatious about taking yet another trail through the forest when we didn’t know its quality-but my sister Jocelyn came through in a big way. I texted her on the Inreach and asked if she could get some satellite imagery of this area to determine the existence of this trail and she was able to verify with Google Earth that 1.) it did exist and 2.) it did connect to good roads. We camped exhausted next to the creek, setting our tents up in 1 foot high weeds, kind of funny to sleep on. Around midnight I heard loud stomping outside my tent, snorting….a bear? Then loud smacking lips and chewing on grass-a deer, or an elk, or a moose. I shrugged and went back to sleep.
Day 13
6 miles
Jukebox heard the animal too and was apparently petrified, crouched in her tent, gripping her bear spray. Not a lot of rest. We started hiking at 7:23am, on beautiful trail-steeply up above a bluff on the creek through the forest. At about 1.5 miles the trail all but disappeared-there were a million intersecting trails, and animal paths, and boot tracks, and in the muddy areas the elk had wallowed and destroyed the trail. The trail did not match any maps we had so it was basically blind thrashing around in the forest. Jocelyn once again came through, utilizing my Inreach location-“you’re above the trail now..” Jukebox joked, “can we get your sister on speakerphone?” After bushwhacking through thick willows in the sun, climbing over 1.5 billion blowdowns, and soaking our feet many times in stinky swamp mud, we finally refound the trail and limped out to the road. I said, “maybe there’s a trailhead!” And Jukebox laughed. We did find the “trailhead”-one plastic brown post with BIG ELK CRK. TH written in Sharpie on the post. Funny. We blasted down the dirt road, FR 975, for 3 miles, then turned onto another dirt road and were immediately collected by a kind local man in a pickup truck who took us all the way to Jackson.
At the laundromat we were joined by Stargate, who had had his own misanthropic adventures for the past 2 days- and Larry Boy, the 4th hiker of this year’s GYL who had been attacked by the grizz in the Absarokas. I looked at his stitched up wounds-10 days out and looking a little pink and swollen. Not good. I think grizzly claw and bite injuries are probably more prone to infection. He showered in our motel room and planned to call the doctors at the small hospital in Cody who had treated him originally, and try to get a prescription for stronger antibiotics.
We relaxed all afternoon then went to a brewery in the evening for a drink-I had 1 beer and immediately was ready to go to bed. We all passed out at about 9:30 pm. Time for a zero day.
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