Chaos muppet: Hiking the CDT thru Glacier National Park

The start of a thru hike is always complicated, and when you start in Glacier, it’s even more. There’s packing, making sure everything at home is done, putting together resupply boxes, turning your backpack into a carryon. Once you get there, it’s navigating there from the airport, scrambling through permits, finding your trail rhythm and trail legs, and apparently also, a massive snowstorm.

The joys of permits at Glacier National Park

I met a fellow hiker at the airport and we shuttled that night to the Two Medicine campground so that we could have easy access to permits. We both would need walk ups. I was hopeful that with us being towards the beginning of the season, we’d have a better chance of getting the ones we wanted.

The permit system at Glacier is super competitive. There’s three waves of permits: the advance permit lottery, the general permits (which I was unable to get), and then the walk up permits, which are available the day before. Each releases in waves but since Glacier is an extremely popular park, the permits are very quickly gone.

We were in line before the permit office opened and didn’t end up leaving the office until 11 a.m. for permits beginning the next day. They weren’t ideal, as there was a section that we’d need to come off trail (twice) and hitch to our front country campsites. But! We got permits.

Chief Mountain and the start of a thru hike

The first day of the thru hike was perfect. We had only 10 miles to do to a lake and it was mostly downhill.

It was my first taste of Glacier’s scenery and everywhere I turned, I was in awe. The flowers were blooming, just as I’d hoped and the sky was a beautiful shade of blue. I crossed suspension bridges, log bridges, wandered along creek beds and alongside wooden fences. Above me, the mountains rose dramatically, snow fields tucked in crevices and shade.

I stopped at Dawn Mist Falls for a little bit and then slowly meandered toward our campsite. Everyone was collecting there at the food prep area (a safe distance away from the campsites so as to avoid attracting bears to where we slept) and we spent the remaining laughing, chatting, and thinking through what our next days and months would look like.

Tomorrow it would rain, we knew, but for today, life was good.

Here comes the snow

We had a pass pretty quickly the next day, and since it was going to rain, we were all up bright and early to get over it before the rain actually started.

It was my first big climb at elevation, and boy, did it hit hard! I passed over small snowfields, and then steadily continued up. As I climbed, the air temperature continued falling and the wind grew stronger. Clouds reached down to touch the peaks. I stopped at the corner of each switchback, pausing long enough to get oxygen again but not so long as to get cold.

It was spitting rain and cold when I reached the top, but not more than 200 feet down on the other side and the rain stopped and the sun came back out.

As I started hiking closer and closer to Many Glacier, I started seeing more people, who all kept mentioning the same thing: “So did you hear about that big storm coming tomorrow?”

“Sure,” I said, confident I knew what they were talking about. I knew there was a chance for some cold weather and a few inches of snow but I didn’t think it would be bad. Besides, I could get the updated version of the weather report when I came into cell service at the Many Glacier Lodge.

Eventually, I ran into Squalo (a friend from the Appalachian Trail and founder of Build-a-Pack), and we hiked into Many Glacier together. He began checking weather, then his glance turned to concern.

“Hey Sparks.”

“Yeah?”

“It’s not going to snow a couple inches anymore.”

“Oh sweet!”

“It’s going to snow 17 inches.”

And thus began the second round of chaos. When was the snow coming in? Could we make it over our 7,000 foot pass tomorrow before it got bad? Would we have to rework all of our permits? Could we even rework our permits? Was it even safe to be on the mountain or did we need to stay in town? As more thru hikers filed in, even more questions, ideas, and concerns swirled around.

Living it up at St. Mary’s

Our permits were for the St. Mary’s campsite so we eventually all caught the shuttle there. As the evening went on, the weather report continued to fluctuate: the snow would start at noon; no, nine a.m.; no, two a.m.; no, ten a.m.; the winds would be 40 mph or 60 or something in between.

Freighter had pushed through two days worth of our permit in one day (32 miles!) to avoid getting behind on it, but Solemate, Catch-up, and myself were not up for those big miles yet. Instead, we decided to wake up in the morning and see what the final report was and if we could get over the pass before the snow hit.

When we woke up, the snow hadn’t started yet as forecasted yesterday evening. But when we talked to a ranger, the report we were given was “it might be completely fine; it might be the worst idea of your life. It’s going to be either/or and we don’t have an accurate enough report through the mountains to tell you what to expect.”

And so, we stayed in town. Ate a town meal. Split hotel room between six hikers. Dried out six hikers’ worth of gear. Watched a history channel feature on why the pyramids were built by aliens. Texted friends and family. Shared pictures. Ate another town meal. Wrote a blog post. Slept.

Back on trail

The day after the snow hit was still cold, but the dreary rain was supposed to let up by late morning. We hid in the hotel room until it mostly quit and then headed out. We decided to stay on permit as much as possible, which meant skipping a section of the trail by Many Glacier. We’d come back and day hike that to avoid having to redo permits.

A kind couple squeezed us four in the back of their truck and took us up to our trailhead. We didn’t have any passes that first day; rather, we walked through the overgrown lakeside trail. Sopping wet plants ranging from hip- to head-height leaned over the trail, making it impossible to stay dry.

I was cold and miserable. Weather didn’t look like it was going to be good until Tuesday, and it was Sunday. It was just going to be multiple days of no sun, drizzling rain, and packing up a wet tent every morning.

As I was deep in the midst of wading through plants and my own childish disdain at the weather, I looked up to see a massive black bear walking down the trail towards me. “Hey bear!” I called, backing up until I could move off the trail for him. I sidestepped the trail, scrambling up a scree field a little ways for him. He barely acknowledged me, continuing his own wet wandering. Finally, when he was even with me, he looked up to see me there and lunged forward, loping further down the trail until he rounded the curve. (That made bear sighting number 4, but the closest one yet.)

Several miles after that, I suddenly realized the rain had lightened almost entirely. The trail led into a meadow alongside a river. Pikas darted between clumps of grass and fallen logs, chirping annoyedly that I’d dare enter their territory.

And then… then there was warmth on my back.

The sun.

The sun.

After not seeing sunlight since it set Thursday night, after watching the storm clouds roll in across the mountains and feeling the temperature drop, after walking through the cold rain fully expecting to not be dry for another two days, the sun came.

I sat on a log, nearly in tears. It felt like stepping out of a winter day into a cabin and holding your hands over a crackling fire; like a perfect sip of warm cocoa; chicken noodle soup when you’re sad.

The sun had come, and everything was going to be okay.

That time I climbed up a mountain in the snow

The next day, we had two passes to climb. Despite the slowly warming weather in the valley, I only had to look up to see that there was still plenty of snow above 6,500 feet.

I started the hike in my sun hoodie, but as the elevation rose, the temperature slowly dropped. Soon, I was hiking just to keep my body temperature up. Snow started drifting in the air, not because it was actually snowing but because the wind was blowing it off the mountain tops.

Patches of snow drifts started appearing on trail, and I followed the kicked-in footsteps across them. We’d all agreed to meet before the snow got too difficult and cross the pass together, so shortly after this, I found everyone sprawled out in puffy coats and rain jackets, taking a break and chowing down on some snacks before we attempted the last stretch of the climb.

For the first part of the climb, we followed someone else’s (and a bear’s) footprints up the snow. The air continued to thin, and the wind picked up as we left the tree line. First the snow was ankle deep, then shin deep, but still we kept going up.

The footprints ahead of me disappeared into the snow, erased by the wind, though I could still tell where the trail went. The snow deepened again, this time to my knees. We traded back and forth who was breaking in the trail. The wind whipped past us with a fury that sometimes made me stop to brace against it, and we fought through snowdrifts up to my waist.

Finally, we made it to the top of the pass, stopping there for a quick moment to catch our breaths and eat a quick bite of food. Then it was down the other side. The snow was less there, up to my knees, but slushy and unstable, and we had to carefully pick our way down. Soon the snow was ankle deep, then only patches, and then suddenly, gone.

We took a lunch break there in the valley, resting our weary muscles and warming back up. The sun shone through a patch in the trees, and dried out our wet pants and warmed us back up.

The next pass wasn’t that far away from our lunch spot, and we agreed to go up it together again. But as I started climbing, I realized something quickly: though the elevation and lesser oxygen had definitely hit me that morning, it was hitting me so much harder this afternoon. My climb was slow, punctuated by frequent stops to catch my breath.

When I made it to the group meet up spot, I dropped on the ground, already doubting if I could make it over the next pass. To make it worse, a cloud had started rolling over the pass, meaning potential weather was coming.

“I don’t know if I can make it over before the cloud hits,” I told them. “You should go ahead of me and not get stuck in the rain.”

They all looked at me and shook their heads. “No, we’re going to get through this together.” And so they did, walking slowly with me, pausing each time I needed to stop, waiting while I caught my breath over and over again. The wind howled and raced across the pass, and the cloud hovered menacingly overhead, but the snow thankfully never got deeper than our shins and the climb was easier than our first day’s climb.

Finally, we made it to the top.

As soon as we crossed the threshold, the snow cleared. I could see all the way down to the pond in the valley without any traces of snow. That night, we camped by the pond, making our food on the shore and watching the sun set over the mountains.

Patching together our permits

Because of the storm, there were some sections that we needed to go back and do as day hikes from the hostel. There was an 18 mile day to the hostel, and then the plan was to take two slack packing days from there to finish up the sections that we needed to.

However, I only made it 8 miles that day, back to the Two Medicine ranger station where I first got permits. My knee had started hurting the day before as we came down from the second pass. I’d hoped that it would have had the break it needed while I slept that night, but it immediately flared up again as I started hiking towards Luna’s. I made the choice to get a hitch from Two Medicine to Luna’s and add a third day of slack packing to give my knee a needed break.

As I write now, all of those sections have been completed. Solemate, Catch-up, and I got hitches to and from Many Glacier to finish up the section that we missed during the snow storm (and which was almost entirely clear of snow this time). That day, we also saw two moose while hiking.

I finished up the part I had left from Two Medicine to Luna’s, and saw a ton of mountain sheep.

And now, it’s into “the Bob.”

Someone called the CDT a “chaos Muppet,” and I have to agree. This has been the wildest ride I’ve had so far and I’m only a week and a half in.

But hey. That’s what makes it an adventure, right? And it’s just beginning.