GDT 2: Wet, Damp, Moderately Dry

Coleman to Peter Lougheed

Another double feature for you, since we haven't had cell service for ten days. We're on the tail end of our zero in Field and I don't know how long this will take to write, so the newsletter might stay one section behind for the rest of the trail. Let's see if I can remember last week - I only wrote about half of this at Peter Lougheed, and as usual my notes are indecipherable.

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The trail angels in Coleman were friendly despite our unannounced arrival. We're the first thru-hikers this season, and we started absurdly early, so they weren't expecting us. Our hosts, Alannah and Dan, fed us an enormous chicken sandwich on a whole loaf of jalapeno-cheddar bread, and we made our first 7-11 trip of the zero to stock up further on fried chicken and potato wedges. After a heavenly shower and a hard sleep in a soft bed, Alannah drove us the next day to the larger suburb of Blairmore, where we donned surgical masks and made a hectic resupply dash through the crowded grocery store. A few older people thanked me for wearing a mask, saying that it was good to see young people taking the pandemic seriously. The Coleman-Blairmore municipality was going through something of a boom. A new coal mine was opening up, and the town was packed with men in work trucks and steel-toed boots. After a thorough wipe-down and sanitizing regimen, we hopped back in Alannah's truck and made a pit stop at the gear store, so I could replace my inadequate socks and look for a new trekking pole. The cheap Walmart pole I had purchased on the AZT had not held up under the stress of whippeting and post-holes, and was now bent at a 30° angle. I sort of succeeded, but had to make do with the less-damaged bottom section to extend my whippet pole. It stuck out awkwardly above my pack, and my replacement was one of those annoying spring-loaded twist-up poles, but there was no better option available.

Our errands complete, we drove back to the Coleman part of town and got to work sorting our resupply over a second 7-11 meal. We were both rather full from breakfast still - we had been served a gigantic portion of herb-loaded scrambled eggs, sausage, toast and hash browns. It was an effort to get through it all, but the call of fried chicken could not be ignored. Alannah offered us sandwiches and homemade cookies for the road, but the prospect of another huge sandwich was more than our stomachs could bear, and we said our goodbyes.

There may have been a slight miscommunication there. As we left, Alannah loaded my pack with single-serve guacamole cups and the aforementioned cookies, and they both wished us good luck and good health. I think they thought we were hiking out, but we were only headed one block over to the BCMI motel. The trail angels were renovating and the plumbers had come that afternoon, and as there was a full house and a temporary lack of running water, we'd just decided to get out of the way for the rest of our zero. Another 7-11 trip ensued, and I spent the remainder of the day fighting with my phone to upload video, writing, and munching on even more fast food.

We slept in that day, as I had been up until 3am writing out the events of the previous tough section. We had 22 miles of roadwalking planned, and my hiking legs were back, so we didn't get out of town until 12:30 that afternoon. It was truly easy walking, and I ate a final portion of chicken strips as we ambled our way up the road. I challenged Constantine to name all 13 provinces and territories, and he did fairly well, naming eight out of ten provinces and one territory, although he bizarrely forgot Yukon and called Northwest Territory "Northern Yellowknife?". We moved on to capitals, where he did not quite succeed. I then schooled him by rattling off all 50 states and about 40 state capitals, although we both got stumped on some of the flyovers. Turns out the capital of Nebraska is Lincoln, and we spent fifteen minutes trying to remember what Boston is called. We joked happily as I reached deep into my memory palace for the countries and capitals of Europe, Africa, and Asia, while Constantine had a surprisingly comprehensive recall for the Caribbean.

"Indonesia!" I yelled gleefully.

"Indonesia City?"

"It's Java. Phillipines?"

"Manila. Umm, Thailand?'

"Saigon! No, that's Vietnam. I don't know the capital of Thailand, actually. Mongolia?"

"Mongolia City?"

"Haha, come on. It's Ulan Ba'atar. India? You should know that one."

"India City!

"New Delhi, you goofball."

"Nepal."

"... dammit. I know this, it's on the tip of my tongue."

Our geographic knowledge exhausted, I pondered the capital of Nepal as we came to the end of our roadwalk at an RV campground. Children were zipping around on ATVs and dirtbikes, and as we set off on the powerline road, friendly barking dogs came to investigate our smell.

"That looks fun," Constantine said, referring to a ten-year-old on a Honda minibike.

"I used to have one of those! My dad built it for me out of two old, broken Hondas. I once flipped it over a fence, too."

The ATV-heavy powerline road soon turned into a wasteland of mudpits and puddles. "So much for dry feet!" I yelled, as Constantine missed a step and sank up to his knees. We squelched and squished through the morass, simultaneously grateful for the well-defined route and cursing the off-road vehicles that pulverized it into a mudfield. I still had two pairs of dry socks, and I switched into a second pair as we left the busy road and turned onto an unmaintained two-track trail.

Prematurely, it turned out. After a mile or two of gentle climbing, the two-track we were following was overwhelmed with snowmelt. At first, we tiptoed carefully around the edges, attempting to keep our feet warm and dry, but the meltwater creek went on for miles. Finally, we gave up on bushwhacking through the tamarack walls and plunged our feet into the stream.

"Ohhh damn that's cold!

"You mean you can still feel your feet?"

"Oh they're talking to me, Magpie. They're saying 'get me out of this stream!'"

The snowmelt was painfully frigid, a degree or two away from freezing back into snow. We hiked as quickly as possible through it and reached another busy ATV route that led us up towards the trail. I switched into my last pair of dry socks, then immediately walked into a muddy bog.

"I guess there's no such thing as dry feet."

"Ohhh, GDT. She's not the friendliest trail, Magpie. Not the friendliest."

"After this trail, we'll be total machines on the PCT."

"The PCT is friendly. She's like your hippie friend who went to Berkeley."

"And the AT is a frat bro."

"The CDT is a tough old lady in the mountains who hunts her own food."

"And the PNT is her cool niece. She runs ultramarathons but is super casual about it."

"Yeah the PNT definitely drinks a beer after the race. She's describe herself as like, 'mostly vegan', but she's super chill."

"The AZT is a desert lady who rides horses, with a silver braid and turquoise jewelery."

"Yeah, she's tough and leathery but kind-hearted when you get to know her."

"And the IAT is a farm girl who's never left her hometown."

"She eats meat and potatoes for dinner and knows all the local history, and doesn't see what all the fuss is about."

"She's so plain, the IAT. Really friendly though."

"She's a nice Midwestern girl."

"And the GDT's an indifferent god."

"Yep."

I have noticed this slightly animist tendency in thru-hiking culture on every trail I've done. On this trail, I've been reading a book called "Spell of the Sensuous", a philosophical text concerning the phenomenology of human senses and the sentient quality of the more-than-human world. Drawing on the same texts from Heidegger, Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, "On Trails," another of my favourite books, makes the case that trail walking is an act of non-verbal communication that's essentially embodied and temporal. As Spell of the Sensuous holds, humans in oral, indigenous cultures engage with the environment in a fundamentally distinct way from writing-centred cultures, and this intense personal relationship with the land is grounded in the spatial-temporal experience of place. The horizon holds the future, the unmanifest, the that-which-is-yet-to-be, while the underground and interior dimensions of earth and all living beings contain and conceal the past, the manifested, and that-which-has-been. And in the invisible life-giving air, there is the present as well as presence, a living breath or spirit that animates and dwells within every sensate being. Thus, the present is felt in every moment not as a singular and divisible now, but as a continuous unfolding of that-which-is-coming-into-being, an infinitude of time-space which contains all we feel, sense, and see. Both books pay particular attention to the Diné (Navajo) sense of place, in which no story can be told unless it is specifically located. While I would never assert a direct equivalence between the linguistic habits of Westernized, mostly colonial thru-hikers and the traditions of deeply rooted indigenous people, I see a faint echo of this sensibility in the way that thru-hikers recall stories and relate ourselves to the trail. The trail is an act of communication through motion, the visible and sense-able trace of every footfall that has gone before. As one's feet retrace and add their contribution to this great accumulation of Others, the trail itself takes on that intelligence. Most hikers, I have noticed, will begin their stories by recalling the precise location where events took place, even if there is nothing obviously relevant there. "So we were just outside of Polebridge when..." "It was after we passed the rock that looks like a llama near Snoqualmie..." "When we got over Mt. Eldridge, there was a hailstorm..." As we immerse ourselves in the environment of the trail, moving at our evolutionarily-correct walking speed, the evidence of our senses becomes the most relevant information available, and we begin to speak of the trail as if it is a sentient being. The richness and texture of the environment promotes a vast expansion of the present moment, and we attend closely to the patterns of airflow and to our sharpened sense of smell. We speak of the intentions of clouds and mountains, and avoid mentioning prospective good fortune, knowing that the trail may provide whatever we wish for a bit too well. Hewing too closely to the metrics of linear time and miles can destroy this magic easily, and the greatest beauty comes to us when we put our maps away and walk in tune with what surrounds. It is this attention to the more-than-human, this sense of participation in a wider natural community, which continuously calls us back to walk trail.

Despite our late start, we made camp in good time, and set up the tent at the base of a minor peak called The Crown.

"Wasn't too bad today." Constantine observed. "Pretty gentle elevation gain."

"Huh. The guidebook calls that 'moderately strenuous.'"

"If that was moderately strenuous, what did he call leaving Waterton?!"

"Well, he also has 'strenuous', 'very strenuous', and 'extremely strenuous' classifications for climbs."

"What's tomorrow?"

"Very strenuous."

"Yeah, seems about right."

We woke up beneath the rain fly as the skies let down. Eating breakfast in the tent, we listened closely as the drumroll of droplets slowed and then petered out. It was nearly eight in the morning when we stowed the wet tent along with our gear and pulled our soggy socks back on, making great time up the "moderately strenuous" climb to The Crown. We were still on ATV road at this point, which traded back and forth between heavily-trafficked mudholes and unused portions made gymnastic by blowdown. The road grew remote and sketchy as we approached North Fork Pass, the two-track narrowing and fading out until it was no more than a wider version of traditional trail.

"You see those grizz tracks?" Constantine asked when I joined him at the summit.

"Yeah, they're everywhere. Made at different times, but definitely the same bears. A momma and a yearling I think, they obviously live around here."

We slipped and slid down the muddy backside of North Fork, still following the prints of the bears. Our ATV track joined a larger gravel one, then spat us out into a wide, drizzly meadow bisected by an active mining road. We spotted some large canine tracks, and debated whether they were wolf or dog. "Wolves wouldn't come here, they're too smart to fool with people. I could see a bear bumbling down in search of food though." A helicopter made a wide, low pass overhead. "Must be from the mine. Maybe they're checking out conditions on the road." We were not yet grateful to see evidence of people, and the helicopter roar was something of an annoyance.

Our "very strenuous" obstacle that day was the high ridge of Tornado Saddle, and as we cruised uphill and onto another disused ATV road, we began feeling pressed for time. The sky had been overcast and drizzling on and off, and now a slight darkening to the west suggested we were on schedule for the three o'clock thundershower. A brief burst of sunshine above our heads allowed us to sit and dry out for a moment, but the thunderclouds weren't far off. So we continued, following moose tracks through a soggy meadow. A map waypoint ahead of us simply read “Avalanche Debris” with no further commentary, and the guidebook had scarcely more detail, instructing us only to “contour around.” The topo did not seem particularly avalanche-y, and as we rose through the narrow valley we grew more and more confused as to which ridge we were headed for.

"Is that Tornado Peak?"

"Oh geez, I hope not. It's ahead of us maybe?"

"Hmm, no, the saddle we're supposed to climb is to the east."

"I don't understand how we get out of the valley we're in right now. It's just big walls and scree everywhere."

After a brief, wet break to refill our bottles and scarf down calories, we found out what the map meant by “Avalanche Debris”. An entire hillside, complete with matchsticked trees, had cascaded down the head of the cirque and obstructed the easier pass.

"This is what I was worried about on that shitty traverse!" I said to Constantine.

"Oh, yep. I see. Well, I'm glad I didn't know this could happen while we were doing it."

"So, how do we get around this thing? Left or right?"

We chose to ascend the right-hand slope, post-holing and hauling ourselves up and around dead trees. It was steep going, and the snow was deep and tricky. Stepping onto what I thought was a securely buried tree, my foot slipped off a chunk of loose bark and I fell, hard, slamming my shin violently into another hidden log. It was the kind of impact that made reflexive tears spring into my eyes, and I let out a pained "oof!" as I slid into an awkward split, straddling the first tree.

"You okay?" Constantine half-turned and looked back as much as he could, wrestling out of his own deep post-hole.

"I'm really glad I don't have balls. But I might be kind of stuck - nope, here we go. That's gonna be a good bruise."

My shin smarted and ached for another two days, the kind of deep bruise I could feel turning colours without even having to see.

The red line on the map would have had us contouring below timberline, but as the trail seemed to be one of those intuitive, invisible tracks, we cut straight up above the snowline to try to find dry scree. The rock above was at a much steeper angle, and after we escaped from the trees we found that my informed assumption was correct - without anything to contain it on the steep slope, the snow virtually disappeared at 7,200ft.

"Ugh, I hate scree." Constantine reliably informs me of this whenever we reach timberline.

"I know, babe. But this stuff isn't too bad actually. It's more talus, really. Pretty stable." Just at that moment, I stumbled and sent a cluster of hand-sized granite edges skittering down. "Ooh. Damn, it's sharp." I released the large rock I'd grabbed to steady myself and picked bloody shards out of my palm. "Okay, yeah, this will probably suck."

It sucked. Pushing hard for altitude, we encountered a confusing mess of cairns high above the red line. Following this mystery trail, we cliffed out repeatedly and eventually found ourselves standing precarious and puzzled above an intimidating drop-off. Our daily thunderstorm, though somewhat delayed, had not forgotten about us entirely and was now howling at our backs along the sheer cliff wall.

"Where do we GO?" I shouted above the wind.

"I see the saddle! Between the two cliffs, there's a chute up and then we just contour! I see trail!" I followed Constantine's gaze and finally caught a glimpse of the so-called saddle, a mere gap in the ramparts of the castellations above.

It was, in a word, terrifying. After a near-miss slip on a stubborn patch of snow, I lost all of my nerve and stepped shakily in the scant depressions that suggested a trail. Rock and gravel rained down from each footfall, and my fearful mammal brain was in overdrive. Gonna die, gonna die, gonna slip and fall and die! Cliff below, cliffcliffcliff, thunderstorm coming, ahh!

“Shut up, brain.” I mumbled to myself. It was just a scree field. “I've done this a hundred times before. If I slip, it'll hurt, but I've got plenty of time to stop.” Cliffcliffcliff, fall and die, fall and die! Concentrate. Breathe. I can do this. Climbing hand over hand up the cliff chute (thankfully free of snow, the calm part of my brain noted), I looped my trekking pole over my wrist and found two sharp fingerholds. Drawing my knee up to my chest, I hauled with all my strength onto that foot, then found another hold and repeated the motion, switching my toes. The basket of my trekking pole caught, and I was forced to twist and look frightfully down as I shook my wrist to free it. The hold in my right hand crumbled away and bounced off the cliff to the valley below, leaving me hanging by the tips of three fingers and one sneaker-shod toe. Gonna die, gonna die! I leaned hard against the shifting rock and scrambled for a more secure grip, slicing a long cut down my pinky as I grasped the knife-like fracture next to my original hold.

"This is scary! I'm sorry I'm so slow!" I yelled up at Constantine, who was standing on the top of the cliff band and looking worried at the oncoming storm.

"It's okay!" He shouted back. "Go as slow as you need to to be safe. I just don't like the look of those clouds!"

I pushed as fast as I was able, scraping away loose gravel with the tip of my trekking pole and tiptoeing across the narrow ledges thus revealed. I was bleeding quite a bit, but I didn't stop to inspect the wound. Fingers have a lot of veins, they always bleed, I told myself, and focused my attention on the fidgety stones.

After ten fearful minutes of scrambling up the loose slope, we finally gained the top of the saddle and looked back at the face we'd just climbed.

"Poor southbounders," I remarked. "That was bad going up, I can't imagine going down."

"We probably followed southbounder's cairns," Constantine said. "It would be impossible to descend on the red route. Makes more sense to stay high and drop at the talus by the trees."

I sat and ate a bar to calm down, and assessed the cut. It wasn't as big as I'd thought, and the bleeding was slowing down. The storm was blowing hard to the west, but we had just missed being caught in its teeth. We were lucky, for sure.

"Oh my god, marked cairns! I see trail!" Constantine was looking down the drop at the northern edge of the saddle. "I was afraid it would be scree on this side too, but there's grass and stuff. It's good trail!"

"Really?" I replied dubiously. From my perch on a rock, all I could see was a snowfield rolling straight down.

"Yes!" He whooped with excitement. "Let's get to camp, I want to beat the storm."

The thunderhead did look likely to blow straight over the saddle in a minute, so I swallowed the last bite of my bar in a gulp and followed him as he kicked-stepped east and down.

The snowfield was over in a moment - it was really a very small patch of slushy snow, all dotted with watermelon algae and shortly about to melt. And then there was trail, gloriously maintained trail. Perhaps a bit too much glorious trail, as we followed what seemed to be a well-defined track only to realize that it would lead us very far over and up to Tornado Peak.

"I guess people do a lot of peak-bagging in this area."

"Ignore the cairns then, I see a marked tree at the creek mouth. Head straight for it, let's go!"

Tornado Saddle was the southern terminus of the GDT in the 70's, and trail crews had done a lot of work restoring it in the summer of 2014. For the next hundred miles we would have brand new single-track to look forward to, and could find our way by following the orange blazes they'd painted on trees. Constantine raced ahead to the trail marker and I followed more slowly, a bit jelly-legged from the adrenalating climb.

"I'll see you at camp," I called. "Don't wait for me, I'll be fine."

"You sure?"

"Yep! Beat the rain and set up the tent for us, I'll be ten minutes behind you."

I flashed back for a moment to my harrowing night-hike on the AZT, but pushed it out of my mind. There were no agaves here to stick me in the knee, and I was slightly breathless but basically all right. We were just over a mile from our planned camp, and the trail was switchbacked and easy. I'll be fine.

I was a bit surprised when I got my second wind. Pushed forward by the rain and pulled onward by the prospect of lying down, my legs found their speed at last, and I wove through the switchbacks in my full long-legged stride. I guess I'm in hiking shape again, I thought idly. My body was propelling itself rapidly downhill, seemingly without any instruction from my mind. I relaxed into my gait and let my thoughts merge with my breathing, becoming a bipedal animal with no language-thoughts at all. I felt the cool shape of the wind as the storm pressed its tendrils against my back, and recognized the scents without naming them. Evening birds took up their night chorus: "Pretty pretty pretty!" "Look at-me! Look at-me!" "Storms-a-coming, storm here!" "Person! Alarm!"

I jogged the rest of the way to camp without even noticing, and greeted Constantine with a cheerful "Hey handsome!" in much the same tone as the birds. He hadn't quite finished setting up the tent yet, but true to his custom he had collected extra water for me.

"You were quick," he said, clipping in a corner of the rain fly.

"Yeah, I got that last-mile energy I guess. What a day."

"Yeah."

And we went to bed.

…

“It says, Moderate hiking on good trail with two strenuous ascents.”

“Oh, so it's easy then.”

“I think so, yeah.”

The next two days were the easiest of the entire trail. After completing the long descent of Tornado Saddle, we hiked luxuriously groomed trail across the valley floor, scaling two steep transverse ridges to join yet another old road. Occasionally, the trail would pop us up above treeline, and we tried to time our breaks with the alpine views.

A rare half-hour of sunshine and warmth graced us on the first climb, and we scrapped our original lunch spot in favour of the ridge. The Great Divide itself rose magnificent and forbidding across the valley, and we watched with fascination as a storm raged on the other side.

“The geography here blows the winds in a spiral, no wonder it's been raining for three days. It's just trapped in the valley.” The few rainclouds that managed to escape over the Divide towards us were whipped into a flimsy mist and dissolved away. “This is nice. We're actually hiking again! And I think my socks are almost dry.”

“It is nice to just walk instead of mountaineering. Ready to go?”

“Just about. Let me pack this up.”

The wind suddenly changed direction as I stowed my slightly damp clothes, and very quickly the rainclouds began to pour over the Divide. “Oh damn, lunch is over I guess!”

“We don't decide, the mountain decides!”

“It's like a feral cat, these mountains. ‘I'm done being admired, you can go now.’”

“You think you can pet the belly, but it's a trap.”

“Fluffy, fluffy, fluffy, claws!”

And then the wind was too loud to shout over. We pounded down the gravel slope holding our hats to our heads, pack straps flying and battering us in faces and chests. “Where'd the trail go?!”

“What?!”

“I said, where's the trail?!”

“WHAT?!”

Many of the cairns marking the ridge trail had fallen over, though fortunately they were made of contrasting white stone and fairly easy to pick out. Once back under the calm dappled light of trees, we paused to adjust our hasty packing jobs and laugh as the rain resumed sprinkling down. “The GDT can't get too soft on us, I guess! She's got a reputation to uphold.”

“How're the socks now?”

“The guidebook would call them ‘moderately dry.’”

The rest of the section passed without incident, a mix of wonderful fresh trail and abandoned mining roads. It rained more or less the entire time. Our last day into Peter Lougheed was a cruisey 35 miles, much of it on a flat clear-cut beneath a powerline. I took the lead on the downhill as usual, racing ahead with my long stride, and shortly we met what both guidebook and map described as “old fire road.” It was completely gone. Aldridge Creek, supposedly seasonal and tiny, had swollen into a mighty torrent of snowmelt and washed out any trace of the road. Sighing, we abandoned our dreams of a 3mph roadwalking pace and resigned ourselves to the slog. After an hour of slow-going bushwhack and bone-chilling fords, we at last, finally, finally arrived at the junction with the powerline. The sun was blazing hot now, of course.

“What time does the camp store close?”

“I dunno, four-thirty?”

“Ah.”

We'd never make it, so we hiked with purpose but took our time. We left the powerline at a confluence with another, larger road, and I was struck with a sense of profound deja vu. Had I been here before? It seemed eerily familiar… absorbed in a fantasy of cycling through Montreal, I spotted a marker for the Trans-Canada Trail. Of course! I had ridden down this exact logging road on my cross-country bike ride, almost exactly four years ago to the day. I had been riding the other way then, so I looked behind me at the mountains and the memory snapped into focus. It had been evening, it had been hailing, I had set up my tent right…. there! I said as much to Constantine, and pointed out the various places where I'd stopped to cook dinner or eat a snack. I could almost taste the dish-detergent flavour of the gross energy chews I'd been eating. The fifteen miles of road had seemed a lot shorter on a bike, and I was looking forward to the long, hot shower that awaited me now.

It was not to be. We arrived at the Boulton Creek Campground in Lougheed at 9:01pm, and discovered that the camp store closed precisely at nine. To make matters worse, the walk-in tenting was closed due to bear activity, and at first the camp host didn't want to let us stay without a reservation. Even more disappointing, the washrooms and showers were closed due to the pandemic, and the tiny campground restaurant only served ice cream.

“Is there running water anywhere? We hiked fifty kilometres to get here, we're fine with hillbilly showers, we just really can't walk any more today.” I put on the puppy-dog eyes while Constantine launched into his Southern charm offensive, and the staff member took pity on us and gave us a spot meant for RVs. We paid $30 for the privilege of listening to generators run all night with no showers, but at least we had somewhere to sleep.

“It's not exactly town, is it?”

“What did we expect? It's the GDT.”