Beartooth/Abskora

This was a quick two nighter to the Beartooth/Abskora wilderness in Montana. Went in on 298 to Falls Creek Campground, hit snow as soon as I got into the dirt portion of the road.

When I got to the trailhead, I wasn't feeling the trip at all. Really thought hard about just turning around and leaving, but eventually mustered up the discipline to pack up and go. In my experience with most things, there's always a million reasons to nix challenging plans, but there are very few valid reasons to actually do so. So i put aside my fears of hungry, freshly un-hibernated grizzly bears and stepped onto the snowy trail ahead of me.

View from a snowfield

And it was snowy.  I wouldn't call it impassable, but I did call it a pain in my neck. Hiked up about 4 miles on the Falls Creek trail before I camped out the first night, grabbed a inclined spot on the side of the trail, made a fire and fell asleep.

Woke up and kept on trucking, unfortunately the snow was ~ 6 feet deep and really powdery with a thin crust on top. I have a technique for dealing with this kind of snow where I imagine myself as a ballerina and very gently tiptoe across the top of the snow, sometimes flapping my arms gently in order to lessen the pressure of my boots on the precarious situation underneath me. I find that this is only nominally effective and have plans in the near future to stop being such a cheap son of a bitch and buy or at least make some snowshoes. In any case, I kept breaking through up to my waist and thigh every few steps on the climb up to a backcountry creek, where S really HTF.

Garbage, just garbage.

Something I've noticed about trails that follow creek banks and gulleys is that the snow on them typically is "loose" and less likely to crust for whatever reason. It may be that trees shade the snow from the sun, which means that the upper levels of snow never melt and then freeze, which means you get no upper crust to walk on. It may be that the relatively low elevations keep the snow cold enough to stay powdery. In any case,  it essentially means that you end up being a snowplow. I spent about two miles chugging through waist deep powder before deciding that I didn't feel like wading through that kind of garbage if I didn't have to. As the trail I was following ascended up to peaks that were permanently snow-covered, I knew that things could only get worse for me. Add to this the fact that I was towards the end of my days off and couldn't go galavanting around a wilderness willy nilly just in case I got lost or hit a delay (the oilfields of North Dakota are not tolerant of truancy), and the decision to bounce was an easy one to make. So I took a left turn and did some cross-country travel down to the creek.

River Island

Even though the move made sense, I hate giving up in all aspects of life, and so I was in a pretty pissy little mood by the time I hit the creek. Got over it, and focused on whether or not I should camp out on an ice island. I had decided to go ahead with the plan when I scoped out a really nice site on the opposite bank.

SO, because it was stupid and because maybe I was clearly getting soft in my old age (as evidenced by the decision to forgo my planned route), I decided to do a quick river crossing and build some character and soon found myself at one of the more pleasant campsites I've stayed at in a long time, albeit with numb feet.

My style of hiking and backpacking generally focuses on getting high, by which I mean that I love altitude. Dunno why, I just do. So I generally have the most fun on a hike climbing up to a pristine campsite on the edge of a cliff or peak and getting to go to sleep and wake up to amazing views.

All this focus on getting up  means that I forget sometimes how nice river valleys can be. The trees that grow on banks block the wind and provide firewood, there's a ton of wildlife around the river and you go to sleep to the sound of running water. It's fucking delightful.

So I made a fire, tried to shoot a few educational backpacking videos and went to bed. Hiked out the next morning to my truck and bounced. Good  trip, even though it wasn't particularly clean, well executed or even well planned.

Pictures are below.

I stopped doing videos of every trip because I found myself following too rigid a format. I'm gonna start making medleys and seeing how that goes.