Walking Away from the Land: Change at the Crest of a Continent

By Jonathan Stewart

Walking Away from the Land focuses on the rapid cultural and climatic changes occurring at the crest of the North American continent. They are challenging the survival of our forests, grasslands, native wildlife, and our very civilization. This book details a three-summer Odyssey hiking the length of the Continental Divide Trail from the Canadian Rockies to the Mexican border. It focuses on the regions cultural and natural history, while using the authors personal history as a Peace Corps volunteer in Nepal and as an Oregon forester to underline the dangers we face as an increasingly urbanized society.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jun 28, 2014
• ISBN: 9781493180905

Book preview

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INTRODUCTION

Unintended Consequences

The brilliant gold-and-orange clouds illuminated by the setting sun fade to purple and violet. I crawl into my tent and use its vestibule to cook my supper, carefully shielding the fire of my wood cookstove from the erratic winds that sweep the crest. No sooner do I finish cooking my dinner then the wind picks up and a rainsquall sweeps in from the west. It grows distinctly darker, and a second blustery storm sweeps in from the south. Sleet piles up outside my tent. Lightning crackles and the wind shifts direction yet again as a third thunderhead brings hail and torrential rain from the north. The three squalls converge overhead. The little world inside my tent is illuminated by a drumroll of zigzagging down strikes. I barely count out the words one thousand and one to gage the lightning’s distance from me before the chaos of light and sound converge overhead. Every filament of fabric between me and a thousand volts of electricity shimmers like spun gold.

This is not the best place to ride out a lightning storm. I am camped beside a small glacial tarn at 12,450 feet, only a hundred feet below the broad summit of the Continental Divide atop a treeless Colorado mountain. Only a few erratic boulders dropped by the last glacier stand higher than my tent poles in this small shallow basin. I flatten myself atop my down sleeping bag in the center of my foam sleeping pad. I pray that my titanium hiking poles, propped up like two vertical lightning rods to support the roof of my tiny tent, are not the highest things around. The air smells of freshly minted ozone, and the hair on my arms dances with static electricity.

I lie stiffly on my back, frozen in the blazing light as the earth shakes under me with each thundering strike. I stare up at a light show of insane shadowboxers that plays on the walls and ceiling of my wind-whipped tent. Sleet and hail bounce madly off the thin fabric and collect into a series of fanciful rolling gargoyles spotlighted by shaft after shaft of brilliant blue-and-white light. They dance down the tent’s ceiling as thunderous drums reverberate across the Divide.

The storm circles overhead and then, as quickly as it came, moves on. The intensity and power of this storm leave me stunned. I can still feel the earth shaking beneath me as it moves southward, rumbling like a steam locomotive down the crest of the Divide. I take a deep breath and slowly sit up. Reaching up, I shake the hail from my tent’s roof and peek out the door. The gentle basin of my ridgetop sanctuary, illuminated every few moments by a distant flash of lightning, is white, covered with a thin patina of hail.

This memory is just one unintended consequence of a choice I made for a campsite over a span of three summers while walking the Continental Divide from the Canadia to the Mexican border. Life is filled with unintended consequences. Some are big, others small; but often, a series of small unintended consequences can add up to something incredibly impactful—like global warming and climate change. Some call it luck or fate, but I see it more like the ripples from a stone tossed into a pond. We all make a choice on the size and weight of the stone and where we toss it into the pond we call life, but we all suffer or thrive from its consequences.

For six and a half months spread out over three consecutive summers, I walked one crenulated ridgeline of our planet, seeing those ripples. I looked down upon the Great Plains of North America, stretching in a flat brown haze to the east, and range after range of violet mountains rolling in a forested sea to the west. I stared down at our nation’s food and fiber baskets while walking atop our continent’s mineral and energy storehouse, the foundation of our increasingly urbanized society. For five months, I saw the often-forgotten and overlooked impacts, the unintended consequences of each of our daily actions, on the very roof of our planet. As Kierkegaard wrote, I have walked myself into my best thoughts.

While following trails tracing the crest of the Rockies, I discovered how far we have walked away from the land and the unintended consequences of living in an increasingly urbanized world. As I walked these high peaks, plateaus, forests, and pasturelands, I saw a cultural archive that ranged from Native American cliff dwellings to twenty-first-century ski resorts. The crest of the Rockies, less than a century ago, was densely populated with mining, logging, and cattle towns. Today, most are just memories, replaced by urban playgrounds and vacant wildernesses. The steel rails of railroads that connected them are rusting away, buried thousands of feet underground in hard-rock tunnels that once carried passengers and freight through the Continental Divide. This exodus from the mountains to the growing cities crowding the Front Range of the Rockies has helped restore many cutover forests and eroded pasturelands while, for a generation or two, helping to postpone the extinction of many native species like the wolf, moose, and antelope.

Learning the history of the land teaches us that how we use it changes dramatically over time. It is easy to see that the more flexible we are in finding creative ways to conserve and preserve it, the more we shall thrive as a civilization.

By 2050, over 80 percent of the world’s population will live in urban areas. Already, in the United States, 82 percent of us live in urban areas while only 2 percent still farm the land. But because the world’s population has grown over threefold in the past century, from two billion people in 1900 to over seven billion today, even more folks sprawl out across our rural landscape. This has enormous impact not only on what and how we use the food, fiber, and minerals that come from those lands, but also on how we preserve what remains of our natural heritage.

My walk illustrated how quickly our planet is changing. Climate change is upon us. Thousands, if not millions, of species, including us, must either adopt or disappear. Summers are longer, hotter, and drier, winters warmer and shorter. Less snow is falling, glaciers are disappearing, insects and wildfires consume our forests, and our springs, creeks, and rivers are drying up. The grizzly bear, moose, elk, and even butterflies are disappearing while fire—and vehicle-ravaged mountain soils are eroding away, filling reservoirs and compromising power and irrigation systems in the Columbia, Rio Grande, Colorado, Missouri, Arkansas, and McKenzie river systems that flow from the Rockies.

Gas and oil exploitation is dissecting our forests with new roads while off-road vehicles erode trails left from two centuries of grazing, lumbering, and mining. Wind farms and weekend homes block migration corridors for wildlife fleeing an increasingly dissecated land. Uncontrolled urban sprawl feeds firestorms at the foot of the Rockies while consuming critical funds set aside to help manage our public lands.

I am both part of the solution and part of the problem. I have seen the yin and yang of rural and urban life. I spent two years in a small village in the hills of Nepal and another quarter century living on a small tree farm in Oregon. I bracketed those experiences by living in cities. Today, for the first time in human history, over half of the world’s seven billion people live in cities. As we step away from the land and find our daily sustenance in urban stores and marketplaces, it is all too easy to forget we are dependent on the land that surrounds us.

My walk the length of Rockies showed me that we need to rethink and replan our urban migration. If contained and managed responsibly, it can give our planet room to breathe. It can reinforce the natural systems we depend upon while providing critical space for productive farms, forests, grasslands, and wildlife. In Canada and the United States, over the past century, our burgeoning cities have transformed our countryside while giving us a chance to restore our public lands. But as I saw—and you will learn in reading this book—we are still abusing our rural lands by overgrazing, overmining, overlogging, and overrunning them with vehicles and unfettered developments. Simultaneously, our urban lifestyle has created a schizophrenic world that all too easily disengages us from our birthright.

In the United States, relatively few of us step far from our car to actually walk our national, state, or provincial forests and parks. Driving our highways, it is all too easy to overlook the details that hint at the dramatic changes that are occurring all around us. They capture our attention only when the results become catastrophic or directly affect us. It is only when we see newscasts of wildfires and drought impacting the lives of people living in these mountains that we briefly wonder why—and then we turn off the TV and forget all about it until the next disaster. It is only impactful when we wake up to a pall of smoke in our own backyard and our water rates or food costs skyrocket.

I am part of this vast urban migration. I once wore citycentric blinders that hid the ecological changes that are rapidly transforming our rural landscapes. It was only when I walked the crest of our continent that I clearly saw what I had long heard: climate change is a clear and increasing threat to our ability to support life on this planet.

And when I say life on this planet, I mean more than simply wildlife. I speak of the air we breathe, the water drink and the food we eat. I speak of the rapidly deteriorating quality and quantity of living ecosystems that are the foundation for human life on this planet. We have the knowledge to deal with these challenges and the tools, like more efficient and less polluting homes, industry and transport, to help us survive and, perhaps, even thrive. Most of the world’s people live under a rule of law that respects and uses land management agencies. What we often lack is the political will and courage to properly use them. Unless we do and do it quickly, it may be too late.

This is a twofold story illustrating the same theme: walking away from the land. One, longer in both foot miles and words, illustrates a rapidly changing landscape as seen from the stormy balcony of the American Rockies in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Our ancestors started walking away from these mountains a century ago, allowing us to preserve much of them in national forests and parks. But today we are still failing to provide clear political guidance on how we want it managed. Lax mining laws over a century old, lack of land use legislation constraining urban sprawl, and lack of funding to properly manage our public lands still allows them to be degraded through over-grazing, and unrestrained development. This story, based on my personal experiences from living in a small village in Nepal to managing a small woodlot in Oregon, illustrates why it is so easy to move away from the land. The costs of living on the land are high, both financially and socially, but the benefits of properly managing it are immeasurable. These are my personal stories of both the costs and the benefits—with a lot in between.

Walk with me.

The Continental Divide Trail Map

Tracing the Crest of the Rocky Mountains, a Convoluted Journey

• June 28 to August 17, 2007: The Canadian border to Mack’s Inn, Idaho

• July 5 to October 3, 2008: Rawlins, Wyoming to the Mexican border

• July 6 to July 27, 2009: Rawlins, Wyoming to Mack’s Inn, Idaho

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CHAPTER I

Glacier National Park

East Glacier

The narrow dark canyons of the Flathead River lead upward to the Continental Divide. Atop Marias Pass, a sun-washed land reveals a new world of wind-woven grass, small copses of aspen, and conifer blanketing gentle hills dotted with blue lakes and tarns. The sparkling landscape rolls eastward in emerald waves to the Great Plains that sprawl out in a golden sea to the east. The serrated stone ramparts of Glacier National Park rise in whitewashed grandeur to the north. After the dark conifer forests of Western Montana, floral meadows interspersed with twisted white-barked aspen and stunted pine, bring light and color to the world. Huddled in the back of a pickup, sharing my seat with George, a chocolate-brown Labrador retriever, I enter a new world and a new adventure.

It’s all downhill from here, David shouts over the roar of the diesel engine and points to the horizon. You will be in East Glacier in twenty minutes, and we will be in Crookston by this time tomorrow. George barks and leaps forward to chase an imaginary ball tossed by David’s pointing hand. He sprawls between the front seats, smashing his wet snout into the windshield. Buffy, David’s wife, grabs George by the collar and firmly shoves him back into our shared backseat kennel.

Mesmerized by the landscape unwinding around us, I whisper to her: The weather is grand! Why don’t you and David spend a day touring the park with me?

I saw it once already, David yells out. I toured the Going-to-the-Sun Highway on a motorcycle—we don’t have enough time to do it again.

What about you, Buffy? Have you seen Glacier? I ask.

Before she can answer, David interjects. Can’t do it . . . . Our families are expecting us. Even though this route is a couple of hundred miles shorter, this two-lane back road is too slow. We’re averaging less than fifty miles per hour versus seventy-five that we could easily do on the freeway. We’ve lost too much time. We need to be moving on.

David’s right, Buffy adds, bowing down to gaze out the windshield at the snow-flecked peaks rising above us. We promised our parents we would be there tomorrow morning, and as you know, none of us is getting any younger.

I ponder their shunning the grand expanse of scenery flowing past our windshield. It is like arriving in the Land of Oz and not bothering to visit the Emerald City

We coast into East Glacier on a warm summer afternoon. First impressions are disconcerting. Except for the snow-flecked peaks rising to the northwest, it appears to be a dusty tourist trap. It consists of a couple of cafés and motels bracketed by a country store and a gas station that all parallel one side of a high railroad embankment. I ask David and Buffy to drop me off at the Backpackers Inn. We circle the dusty backstreets a few times before finding it hidden inconspicously on a dirt side street. A wooden sign announcing twenty-dollar-a-night beds dangles above a small wooden gate beside a Mexican restaurant.

I clamber out of the truck and stretch my legs. George jumps down, circles the truck, lifting his leg to carefully water each tire. David unlocks the rear door of the camper and hands me my pack. Tossing it over my shoulder, I clamber onto the restaurant’s wooden porch. A sign tacked to the front door states that the restaurant does not open until five in the afternoon. A plank gate leads to a grassy courtyard behind the restaurant. It is framed by a long green shed broken with a series of doors and windows that is backed by a small garden shed, and a six-foot-high pine fence. In the shade of a willow tree, a tire swing spins languorously from a long rope. The wooden picnic table is covered with maps and books. We follow the sidewalk to a green wooden door marked Men.

We knock lightly. There is no answer. After peering through a wood-frame window, we turn the knob and step into a whitewashed room filled with three two-by-four plywood bunk beds and a white porcelain sink. A wooden door stands open, displaying a small bathroom. A side door opens to an adjacent room also filled with more bunk beds.

Stepping into this room, I see the shadowy figure of a young woman sitting in a chair against the far wall. She appears to be writing a letter on a book balanced on her crossed knees. Her face is hidden beneath a tan, broad-brimmed hat. A backpack and sleeping bag are neatly laid out on the bed and a pair of hiking boots carefully placed on the wood floor beneath it.

Hi! I say. Is there anyone here we can check in with?

She glances up. Her plain brown hair is twisted into a simple bun at the base of her neck.

Standing up, she carefully places the book and paper on the bed beside her. She stretches out her hand in greeting. A head shorter than me, she is wearing a simple black and dark teal wind shell with a Nehru collar and long khaki hiking pants.

Hello, I’m Hmmm, she says. Her accent is clipped and sounds European.

I smile. I know that from this trail name that she is a long-distance hiker. Thanks to my frugal backpack, she has recognized me as one as well.

Hello, Hmmm, I say, stepping across the room to shake her small, cool hand. I’m Basmati and this is my friend David. Do you know if these bunk beds are reserved?

She laughs. Basmati, like the rice?

Correct, like the rice . . . Where did you get your trail name?

From the AT, she says, turning to shake David’s hand. This is the women’s room. You were in the men’s room next door. Nobody is there yet, but the men’s dorm may be booked up. This place was filled last night. You can check to see if a bunk is available by asking the prep cook. Knock at the back door of the restaurant. She should be here by now.

Hmmm? Basmati? AT? What kind of names are those? David looks quizzically at me.

Oh, I am sorry, David, she answers with a shy smile. I thought you were both long-distance hikers. Hmmm is the name I was given while hiking the Appalachian Trail, but you can call me Lilian if you prefer. Tomorrow, I intend to start hiking the Continental Divide Trail.

So does my buddy . . . um, Basmati . . . here! Glad to meet you, Lilian, David says.

Basmati is the name I earned for my diet of basmati rice on the Pacific Crest Trail a couple of years ago, I say to alleviate David’s obvious confusion.

Well, this looks like the hostel you were seeking, . . . Basmati. He grins. You’re all set. Buffy and I need to stay on the road if we hope to reach Crookston by tomorrow evening. See you in a couple of months. Call us from Yellowstone. He gives my hand a hearty shake. We’ll see you there. Good luck!

He turns to leave, but pauses at the door. Looking back over his shoulder, he yells out, It was good to meet you, Lilian . . . oh, or if you prefer, Hmmm. Sorry my visit is so short, but we are in a bit of a hurry. Places to go, friends to meet! Hello and goodbye! With a wave, David strides to his truck. I toss my pack on a bunk in the adjoining room and rush out to give George, my canine backseat buddy, a friendly pat and Buffy a goodbye hug. With the roar of a turbo-charged engine and a cloud of dust smelling of diesel and horse manure, they are gone.

I return to the shade of the picnic table. A light breeze stirs the willow’s leaves as Hmmm joins me. She is walking barefoot in the uncut grass, carrying her socks and boots. She pauses, closely examining me before smiling. So you’ve hiked the PCT? she says, sitting down.

Before I can answer, she continues. I hiked a portion of it two years ago—the John Muir Trail about 270 miles from Yosemite to Mount Whitney. Last summer I came out here to hike the CDT. I spent a week hiking Glacier Park from south to north, before I succumbed to doubt and an unexpected it of homesickness. I impulsively got back on the train to return home—although I did hike a little of the CDT in Colorado and New Mexico first. I’m starting again this year and I plan to walk as far as I can before the snow arrives. This morning, I hitched up to the ranger station at Two Medicine to get my backcountry permit for the park.

Why don’t you just continue southward from here, why hike Glacier again? I say, mystified that she would want to hike the same stretch of trail again.

She looks at her bare feet and wiggles her small white toes. She glances up at me with a faint hint of a smile. Hmmm . . . , she says with a thoughtful pause. I am hiking it again because the scenery I saw last year was incredible. Why not see it all over again? Besides, I’m going in the opposite direction this time.

Did you say there may be no more hiking permits available? I ask, suddenly realizing the implications of what she had said. Arriving here just before a holiday weekend, I was concerned would find it challenging to obtain a permit to stay at exactly the right campsites along my route of travel within the park, but I never thought it would prove a major impediment. While hiking the PCT, I carried a thru-hiker permit that allowed me to hike and camp in the national parks and in heavily regulated wilderness areas with no problem. There is no such free ride on the CDT.

Hmmm . . . Possibly. Most campsites I was interested in were full. The first one I’ve got, near Chief Mountain, is a four-mile detour from the trail, she says, slipping on her socks and boots. It took a while to get my permit at Two Medicine. From what I saw on their computer, you will have to wait at least a week to find a series of open backcountry campsites to hike the length of the park. It is the peak of the summer tourist season, and most backpackers made their reservations months ago.

I never dreamed it would be so difficult! I say. Do you know who I can talk to about getting a reservation?

You’ll have to catch a ride up to Two Medicine. There is no Park Service office here in East Glacier. If I were you, I would call them first to inquire. There is a pay phone at the lodge. I have the name of the ranger that I spoke to here on my permit. She was very helpful, but you’d better hurry because I think her office closes at four thirty.

She pauses for a second after lacing up her boots and looks at me closely. I am walking over there now to do a bit of writing at one of the desks near the lobby. I can show you where the phone is located.

Just a minute! Let me check in here at the inn with the prep cook, and I then will join you at the lodge.

She meets me at the gate after I book the last available bed for the night in the men’s dorm room. The prep cook tells me the remainder of the weekend is booked solid.

Hmmm, is there a late-day shuttle to Two Medicine?

She smiles wistfully. No, I arrived by Amtrak yesterday afternoon and discovered that the park shuttles only run to Two Medicine once a day in the morning. The shuttle does not pause there long enough time to pick up a permit and return to East Glacier in one day. A few minutes before you arrived, I had just returned from hitching the twelve miles between here and there.

I slip on my lightweight sunhat designed for desert hiking. I notice that she is wearing a hat similar to mine, but with a heavier fabric that stylishly matches the color of her pants. We get strange looks from the cowboy-hatted locals sputtering by in their rusty pickups. Our hats make us look like a pair of Foreign Legionnaires lost in the cowtowns of Montana. Our hats’ stiff brim and loose neck cloth mark us as tourists, but they provide far better sun protection than the Montana sombrero that arrived along with of the cow over a century ago.

We walk under the railroad tracks and stride up a hill on a pathway between a brilliant green lawn and a dazzling array of carefully nurtured wildflowers. My companion tells me that she too arrived by train, but from the opposite direction after three days traveling from her home on Martha’s Vineyard, an island off the coast of Massachusetts. She explains that Hmmm became her trail name because she couldn’t say much more than that after being plagued by clouds of mosquitoes on the AT.

As we admire the golden sunflowers and purple lupine, we share our mutual paranoia about grizzly bears and the precautions we have taken in case we encounter one. We each carry fifteen ounces of pepper spray. She also has a food bag made of tooth—and claw-resistant Kevlar fabric while I carry a foghorn designed for boats. It can easily surpass the sound of a rock concert and destroy the hearing of the nearest mammal.

Her tasteful clothing and cultured Eastern accent reminds me of a youthful Audrey Hepburn. She blends in with the well-dressed tourists crowding the porch of East Glacier Lodge. Walking up the stone steps, she looks like a New York debutante who has just stepped from a private limousine. The neatly attired bellboy welcomes us with a broad smile as he opens the massive wood doors. She pauses to thank him for helping her find a ride earlier in the day and explains to me that she hitched a ride with two of his buddies to Two Medicine.

We step into the spacious lobby with its massive dark colonnade of rough-barked Douglas fir. This grand tourist lodge was built over a century ago by James J. Hill to encourage wealthy Eastern patrons to use his newly built railroad to visit the park. Before finding a quiet writing desk, Hmmm shows me a bank of telephones discreetly hidden in the far end of the lobby. She carefully writes down the rangers’ names and their telephone number.

After a brief conversation with the backcountry ranger, I learn that Hmmm was right—all the backcountry campsites in Glacier National Park are filled for the holiday weekend. The ranger also mentions that they discourage hikers from hiking alone through the park because of the danger of meeting bears on the trail.

But you just gave a permit to a single woman earlier today! I reply.

Oh yes, she says. We did. She was very persistent, and although we strongly encourage hiking with another person for safety, there is no steadfast rule about not hiking alone.

Suddenly a light goes on.

Please wait a moment! I will be right back! I say, placing the receiver on top of the phone.

I rush over to the table where Hmmm is writing out postcards. Breathlessly, I sit down beside her. Hmmm, would it be possible—I begin. She places her forefinger to her lips before looking up. She gives me a gentle smile and whispers, I think I know what you want. You wish to hike with me on my permit? Am I correct?

I nod. She looks me up and down. Her lips part in a silent, thoughtful hmmm before she answers. Yes, you can join my permit, but just for the length of Glacier National Park. I much prefer to hike alone.

Before agreeing to add me to Hmmm’s permit, the ranger asks to speak to Hmmm to make sure I am not holding her at gunpoint. I then arrange to stop at the St. Mary’s visitor center the following morning to pay an additional fee of forty dollars that will allow me to be second party on Hmmm’s eight-day hiking permit from Chief Mountain to East Glacier. I thank the ranger for her help. She thanks me for making her job easier by sharing a preexisting itinerary while creating a far safer hiking group.

Overjoyed at my coup, I return to Hmmm as she folds her postcards into a green EU passport. I thought you said you’re from Martha’s Vineyard? Why are you carrying a European passport?

"Oh, I am American and have lived in Martha’s Vineyard for most of my life. My mother was born and raised in Finland, so I carry two passports because like her, I love to travel.

We spend the remainder of the afternoon sharing the outlines of our lives beneath massive Douglas fir columns of the East Glacier Lodge. Designed like a great temple with high windows framing the landscape of silken-leafed aspen and deep-green lodgepole forests that rise in soft waves to the high meadows and rocky peaks of Glacier Park to the west, it is a perfect place to learn more about my new hiking companion.

Although nearly three decades younger than me, she doesn’t seem concerned about hiking with a man almost the same age as her father. She says that she hiked with people of all ages on the Appalachian Trail. As I listen to her describing her cultured life back East, extensive travels, and previous long-distance hiking experiences, I am impressed by her determination; for not only has she capably hiked the Appalachian Trail and John Muir Trail alone, but she also attempted the CDT last year and is now returning to finish the quest. She explains that the rest of her family is also well-traveled, but she is the only one who has done any long distance backpacking.

She is a graduate of Bard College with a degree in eighteenth-century English literature; she prides herself as an independent editor and world traveler. She grew up in Thailand, has traveled to India twice and visited Russia, Mongolia, and China on the Trans-Siberian Railway. Besides traveling, she loves literature, art, and film and expounds on the many art museums she has toured.

I feel out of place. My world of chainsaws and timber falling, forest fires, and smoke jumping has few links with hers beyond travels in Europe and Asia. But discovering that her father was a Peace Corps volunteer in Thailand and later built her family’s post-and-beam home on a woodlot on Martha’s Vineyard creates some commonality. I tell Hmmm of the two years I spent as a Peace Corps volunteer in Nepal, and of the two log homes we built on my family’s tree farm near Mount Hood in Oregon.

Unlike Hmmm, who hiked the Glacier National Park trails alone last year, I, like most hikers new to the park, am terrified about the possibility of meeting a grizzly bear. There are few carnivores left in this world that can still eat man for lunch and the grizzly is one of them. I point out that our jabbering will help keep them at bay, but Hmmm does not seem as keen on conversation as I am. As I chatter on about my experiences meeting benign black bears on the trails I have hiked, she maintains a distant, reserved silence. It is as if she has already said too much about herself. Perhaps I made an error and she is having second thoughts about my joining her. I may prove an uncomfortable intrusion on a deeply personal quest.

We wander back to Serrano’s, the Mexican restaurant fronting our hostel, for dinner. After watching her spend ten minutes reviewing the menu and carefully interviewing the waitress before selecting a vegetarian entree, I sit back to enjoy my beer.

I am a bit of a fanatic when it comes to health and hygiene, she explains. I rarely drink alcohol and only eat whole grains, vegetables, and fish—no four-legged creatures and only occasionally two-legged ones.

She laughs at my quizzical expression. No, I am not a cannibal. I mean birds.

The next morning, I awake early. I shower and go outside so as not to wake other hikers. Most of the men clambered into the neighboring bunks well after midnight. They were celebrating across the lawn in Serranos’ outdoor beer garden. I read at a sun-warmed picnic table, munching on half the burrito left over from last night’s dinner. I wander over to the local store where I leave my food cache with a helpful clerk. I arrange to pick it later in the week before beginning my trek through the Bob Marshall Wilderness. After wandering the dirt backstreets filled with the decaying trailers and shanties of East Glacier’s working residents, I walk a cement sidewalk under the railroad tracks toward the tourist side of town. Tidy cafés, art galleries, and cottages surrounded by neat gardens lead from the East Glacier Lodge northward along the highway into the park.

At midmorning, I return to the hostel, gather my gear, and join Hmmm to catch the shuttle to the Canadian border. Just as we leave the hostel, two women in their twenties stride in. After sharing a few cursory trail reports, they tell us that they too are continuing their hike southward on the CDT. After discovering they have hiked the AT and PCT, Hmmm is keen to continue speaking with them, but we are running late and have already paid for our shuttle. Wistfully, she scribbles down their names and addresses before saying goodbye. We sprint under the railroad tracks and up the lawn to the massive log columns flanking the front steps of the lodge. Three or four bright-red classic Ford tour buses, their canvas roofs rolled back for the beautiful sunny weather, seem to await us. Much to our disappointment, we are relegated to a tightly packed white fifteen-passenger Dodge van. Our van is taking half-a-dozen elderly tourists across the border to Waterton National Park in Canada and will drop us off at the border.

An hour later, Chris, our shuttle driver, patiently waits outside as the ranger at the desk inside the St. Mary’s Visitor Center rattles off a litany of rules and regulations. As she carefully fills out our revised permit and enters the data on her computer, I glance at the surrounding displays. They hint that in a few decades Glacier National Park will be a misnomer. In 1910, when the park was established, there were approximately 150 alpine glaciers in the park. Today there are fewer than 25 glaciers over 25 acres in size. Computer-based climate models predict by 2030 that some of the park’s largest glaciers will vanish. Increasing spring, summer, and fall temperatures, a reduction in the winter snowpack thanks to more rain than snow falling and a century-long increase in the mean annual temperature (almost double increases found elsewhere on the globe) are combining to melt Montana’s glaciers. Will they then call it Glacier-less National Park?

I hurry to explain that I have watched the required bear video on the Web. This avoids another ten-minute delay and more bitter words from my less-than-patient fellow passengers. They are already grumbling about reducing our driver’s tip because of our delay. The matronly ranger helps us reserve a plastic bear vault to pick up later in the week and carry through the portion of the park that lacks bear-proof campsites.

The Belly River Valley

It is a sparkling midsummer day as we drive through the rolling foothills of the Blackfeet Indian Reservation. It is filled with shimmering green aspen and herds of black cattle. We arrive at the Chief Mountain trailhead a few steps from the Canadian border at two in the afternoon. We pause for a short lunch before hiking southwest down densely forested ridge into the heart of the Belly River Valley. Broad meadows filled with snowy cow parsnip and scarlet Indian paintbrush line the sinuous path along this riverflowing northwards towards Canada and the Arctic Ocean. For six and a half hours we stride briskly along under clear blue skies.

Hmmm tells me about her home on Martha’s Vineyard. "I’m much enamored of summer on the island, even though it is overrun by tourists and the traffic’s horrendous. Most of the time, the traffic doesn’t bother me since I’m on a bike. The summer roadways do become dangerous when there are so many other cyclists of widely varying skill levels. I ride very defensively—for there are so many hostile, uninformed drivers and other cycling tourists who are inexperienced or flagrantly not following the rules of the road. I try to stay off the main roads and stick to less-traveled routes. Even so, I was hit by a car once, but not badly.

"It is good to get away. Before I left, I was cooking nearly every day for a wealthy summer resident and her family—lunch only, but food shopping, kitchen cleanup, and menu planning consumed my afternoon and evening hours too. When I wasn’t doing that, I was editing text for the film festival and an event planner who is building a website, looking after my nephews, cooking dinner for my father and myself, weeding the vegetable garden, or cleaning the house.

July weather in the East is muggy. It certainly is not as cool and temperate as here. I ride down to the beach fronting my grandparent’s home for a swim every evening from May through October. The natural world around our home delights me—the masses of summer flowers (daylilies, hydrangea, buddleia, daisies and other asters, Queen Anne’s lace) and the wealth of our vegetable garden (purslane, herbs, tomatoes, chard, raspberries), but none of that there can equal this scenic grandeur!

At dusk, clouds begin to slip over the shimmering mountain passes lined with snow to our west. Chief Mountain, layered like a giant half-eaten carrot cake, frames our southern horizon. Our even patter of conversation interspersed with regular shouts of Hey bear! when we enter thickets of brush keeps the bruins at bay. After ten miles walk the groves of aspen and lodgepole pine open out onto a broad meadow beside Glenn Lake. Rain starts falling as we arrive at our campsite, a ten-foot-square log frame holding a damp pile of gravel. The sharp shards create a level platform a few inches above a brushy bog. Our two tents barely fit side by side atop the small platform. Our first campsite is a four-mile detour from the main trail, but lengthy detours like this are the only option during the short summer backpacking season at Glacier National Park. Tonight, all five sites in this backcountry campground are occupied.

As the sky darkens, sharp gusts of wind bring driving rain. I opt for a handful of nuts and raisins followed by a candy bar in my tent, but Hmmm stubbornly insists on preparing her dinner of grains and lentils. They take over an hour to cook. Although it is over a hundred feet to the designated cooking area, as the rain turns to sleet, I can hear her over the tumult of the storm. She huddles under a GoLite reflective umbrella, carefully feeding damp twigs into her wood-burning cookstove. Snuggled deeply in my sleeping bag, I hear her cursing the cold rain dripping down her back and every blast of wind. It is obvious that her education is far broader than the urbane classrooms of Bard, for tonight she is entertaining the campground with the much livelier vocabulary of her seafaring family.

Listening to her, I am embarrassed to be lying dry and warm in my new lightweight backpacking tent. At two pounds, it is a real prize, but today’s walk already has me planning to shed a few superfluous pieces of clothing to compensate for the extra pounds of winter fat I am still packing around my waist. I am asleep by the time Hmmm crawls into her tarp tent. I awake to hear her again swearing as she discovers that the wind, sounding like a 747 lifting off the end of a runway as it sweeps over the top of the Continental Divide and funnels down this narrow pass, has driven rain inside her tent, soaking her sleeping bag.

It is midnight. I slip into my rain gear and clamber outside to help her hang her food out of reach of bears. Sleet and snow driven by whistling winds pummel us. She is cold, shivering, exhausted, and on the verge of tears as we use the pulleys and cables provided by the Park Service to pull our food bags high into the air. We slip back into our respective tents. I fall asleep to the sound of her cursing at being a woman. Apparently she is dealing with the bloody debris from her menstrual cycle. She loudly complains that it isn’t fair, she has absolutely no plans to bear children. It is my turn to wonder what I have gotten myself into.

The next morning, we awake to bright sunshine. Hmmm is in a much better mood—cheerful and enthusiastic—despite her difficulties the night before. We join a young couple from Hawaii for breakfast at the campground’s community cook site. They tell us they are spending their summer touring all 360 national parks, national monuments, and national historic sites in the continental United States. I had no idea there were that many, but over two hundred years of history add up to a lot of presidential homes and battlefields.

After breakfast, as Hmmm carefully shakes out and folds up her tent, I quickly stuff my tent, sleeping bag, and food bag into my pack, heft the pack onto my shoulders, and gets ready for the trail. After ten minutes standing patiently in the sunshine, I slip my pack down, pull out a book, and sit down to read. Hmmm continues packing, squeezing her clothing, food, tent, medical kit, and sleeping bag into recycled plastic bags covered with advertisements in Hindi, Thai, Russian, and Finnish. She then carefully stuffs each waterproof packet into a pack that resembles an oversize gray tortoiseshell. Although she weighs two-thirds what I do, her bulging pack is as heavy as mine. After carefully arranging and rearranging each item, she uses her thighs to squeeze the two halves of her pack together and struggles to zip the bulging clamshell closed. Standing up, she spends another five minutes arranging her waist-length hair. She neatly twists it into one long strand to pin atop her head in a bun. Slipping on her hat, her final ritual involves a bit of yoga: from a standing position, she bends straight down from her waist to carefully retighten and double tie the laces on her boots. Slinging her pack on her shoulders and picking up her hiking poles, a half an hour after I sat down, she is ready to go.

We retrace our steps back down the Glenn Lake Valley four miles, skirting Cosley Lake to rejoin the trail heading south. We come to the rain-swollen waters of the Belly River. The ford is fifty feet wide and looks thigh deep. We slip off our boots and tie them around our necks. I slip on my flip-flops, but Hmmm goes barefoot, as she says she has always done when fording. A taut strand of thin aircraft cable stretched across the river at chest height helps us maintain our balance in the swiftly flowing water. We step gingerly on the round tumbling rocks that slip and slide beneath our feet. As we scramble up the opposite bank, I look back. Hmmm’s pants are soaked to her waist, but she is grinning broadly at successfully crossing our first major ford. Drying our icy feet with our socks, we lace up our hiking boots. The trail swings around a ridge, over a forested lateral moraine, and up the east fork of the Belly River. We pause to photograph Dawn Mist Falls, a shimmering silver cascade thundering sixty feet down a shattered ledge of glistening black slate.

We discover the long-distance hiking challenge of the park’s bear policy: it shortens our daily trail miles by keeping all backcountry visitors confined to the same designated campgrounds for the night instead of choosing our own campsites. Lunch and dinner both end up being on the shores of Elizabeth Lake. We repeatedly dine in the cooking area at the campground, drying our damp tents and gear while reading, napping, and writing. Today is a very short day; tomorrow will be longer, but still less than twelve miles over a 7,500-foot pass.

As we leave the campground the next morning, we come across a steaming pile of green bear scat the size of a turkey platter. A grizzly paid us a visit last night. Hmmm’s welcome nonstop patter about her exotic travels combined with our periodic shouts Hey bear! continue to keep this bruin at bay. For the rest of the day, we see no further signs of the grizzly. We do see a couple of lanky Columbia ground squirrels, one fluffy marmot, and two white goats, the pair posing atop a massive stone pyramid above Redgap Pass. This pass marks our passage from the headwaters of the Bear River to Kennedy Creek. Horned peaks, arêtes, glaciers, U-shaped glacier valleys provide classic alpine scenery that underlines the popularity of this park among the world’s hiking community.

Our third short sun-warmed day ends at Pala Lake. We share a campsite with three other parties: a multigenerational family of four consisting of a father from Bozeman, and son, daughter, and grandson from opposite coasts; a young couple from Calgary; and a single young woman from Olympia. As we cook dinner, Hmmm happily displays her food bag’s nutritious array of rye bread, grains, legumes, and spices that weigh half as much as my granola, lentils, rice, nuts, cheese, dried fruit, and chocolate. Although her food takes longer to cook, she can easily cook for over an hour on her compact five-ounce wood-burning stove using twigs and needles she finds lying on the ground around us. I carry two eight-ounce red plastic bottles of fuel stabilizer for my inefficient little alcohol stove, and constantly worrying about running out of fuel.

It is only seven miles to our next campsite at Many Glacier, so we awaken late the next morning and join the couple from Calgary for breakfast. After a morning swim in the lake, the young woman is combing ice crystals from her hair by a blazing campfire. We are impressed by these tough Canadians, clearly acclimatized to these rugged northern climes. A gentle climb over a low ridge and a descent through flower-laden meadows bring us to Lake Shelburne. Purple lupine and scarlet Indian paintbrush are abuzz with bees on the talus slopes below Apikuni Mountain. We eat lunch atop a roadside boulder.

Returning to the Land

So you built a log cabin on your tree farm in Oregon? Hmmm asks, eating the half of her dinner which she had set aside from the previous night.

Both a log cabin and a log lodge, I say, munching on tortillas and cheese. "My wife and I were part of the ‘back to the land’ movement that peaked in the 1970s. Like your father, after I returned from two years in the Peace Corps and time spent traveling through Africa and the Middle East, I was upset by our nation’s foreign policy. The assassination of Martin Luther King and the two Kennedy brothers plus the Vietnam War had alienated many of us. A foreign policy built around Kissinger’s ‘realpolitik’ had no place in my world.

"I returned to seek a master’s degree in journalism at the University of Oregon, but after working on a friend’s weekly newspaper in Central Illinois for a winter, decided to move to British Columbia where a number of my friends had settled to avoid the draft during the Vietnam War. I actually put some money down on forty acres of land in the Slocan Valley and I was working for the US Forest Service, saving money for a move there when my grandfather was killed by a logging truck.

"He had built his retirement home on a 120-acre stump farm near Mount Hood. It was an hour’s drive from Portland. A week after his death, his home was burglarized. I put my plans for Canada on hold and moved into his all-electric three-bedroom ranch-style home just as the first energy crisis hit. Within six months, a half dozen friends joined me. We called it a commune, but it was little more than a glorified male campout.

"We cleared land for a garden. I transferred the skills learned as a rice farmer in Nepal to growing vegetables in a temperate rainforest. With ten feet of rain a year and surrounded by a vertical wall of hundred-foot fir, I quickly learned that beans, greens, and crucifers were our only viable crop.

"About a mile up the road was another rural commune consisting of a group of young doctors and nurses. We often met for potluck dinners. At one of these, John, a friend visiting from Canada, shared of his adventures building a log home. David, a young emergency room physician, and his girlfriend Gail were entranced. By the end of the evening, we had sketched out the plans for a nine-hundred-square-foot log cabin on a bar napkin.

"That was the summer that a beautiful young woman named Marty, whom I married a year later, first joined me on the tree farm. John and I committed to building the cabin at a remote site on the farm for three thousand dollars in labor, but only if David and Gail would peel the logs and purchase all the materials. For two weeks, John and I thinned the forest, using an old Ford farm tractor to yard the logs to a clearing near a small stream. David and Gail set up their teepee in a meadow near the cabin site. They spent the month of May peeling logs and digging iron spikes out of decaying logging railroad trestles as I joined John to explore a trapline he had purchased in the Canadian Chilcotin.

"In June we returned. Marty, who had recently graduated with a master’s degree in special education, helped me remodel a small workshop. We converted it to a home by piping in cold water to the workshop, digging a hole near the front door and framing an outhouse over it. John and I spent that summer constructing the cabin. Every afternoon Marty brought us lunch and cold beer that we shared in the shade of a massive fir tree. We used a portable mill to cut the planks for the floors and ceiling. The tractor and a temperamental one-ton International truck, along with lots of ingenuity, muscle, and sweat, lifted seventy-five logs in place for the walls. We drilled holes and then used a sledgehammer to pound the rusty spikes in place in each corner after each round of logs was notched and fit in place. We collected a half-dozen young men to help us lift six, forty-foot-long purloins, used to support the roof, into place.

"We used chainsaws, axes, and a scribe to mark and fit the logs, a brace and bit to drill the holes, and a sledgehammer to drive home the spikes. My building had been limited to birdhouses, so I was suitably impressed with my new-found skills. When we had finished with the walls, we framed in log dormers on the south side of the roof. We used our chainsaws to cut out holes in the walls to match the random sizes of recycled wood windows that David and Gail had collected. We constructed two stout exterior doors out of heavy planks and hung them on barn hinges. David and Gail spent that fall chinking the log walls with mortar and collecting our scraps in a woodpile. They folded up their teepee and moved in under a brilliant autumn moon, calling their new home ‘Red Moon Lodge.’ When the winter rains arrived, we abandoned the skid road. They cheerfully spent the next decade walking half a mile back and forth down a narrow dirt pathway to their log home in the woods.

"I’m proud of that cabin. In three months, we’d transformed trees thinned from a forest into the comfortable home that we still use as a weekend cabin today. David and Gail’s first daughter, Lara, was born there. With gas lights, a wood cookstove, and a second wood-heating stove, an outhouse, and a propane gas heater for hot water, it is a classical piece of early hippy craftsmanship.

Ten years later, based on the skills we learned that summer, Marty and I built a log lodge for our own family, but it is getting late. We’d better get going if we want to pick up our bear barrel before the ranger station closes. I’ll share that much lengthier saga of building that far more refined home with you another day.

Many Glacier

We drop down a steep ridge to follow a dusty horse trail paralleling the highway leading to Many Glacier. After crossing a bridgeless glacial torrent we stop by the ranger station where we pick up a sixteen-ounce one-gallon plastic bearproof food container for the next stretch of trail. Hmmm thanks the staff for providing containers free of charge. Backpackers elsewhere (in the Sierra national parks, for example) are required to either buy or rent them.

We search out two tent-shredding, sharp-edged gravel pads reserved for backpackers. They are in the middle of Many Glacier’s sprawling family campground. We walk to the nearby store, where we buy tokens for hot showers. Our celebration continues with Ben and Jerry’s ice cream, wine, crackers, and cheese at our campsite. We feel like monks among this crowd of road-weary tourists, blessed by minor luxuries they take for granted.

Daybreak, another CDT hiker and math teacher who is in his early forties and a math teacher from Massachusetts joins us at our picnic table. He has hiked both the AT and PCT and plans to hike as far as Wyoming this summer. Nick, yet another handsome young CDT hiker whom I met a few years ago on the PCT, joins us at dusk. He tells of joining Navigator, another past PCT hiking buddy of mine, for their snowbound assault on the Sierra. Since then, he has hiked the AT, the Pyrenees, and a scramble route that runs the length of Corsica. He started his hiking season earlier this spring by hiking five hundred miles in the High Sierra. Young, fit, and carrying a backpack smaller and much lighter than most day hikers carry—he has covered the same distance as Hmmm and I hiked in half the time: an impressive thirty-four miles the first day and twenty-six miles today.

We spend the evening talking about other long-distance hikers whom we have met or of whom we have heard, who are hiking the CDT this summer. We guess there are about fifteen hikers attempting to hike the trail southward from the Canadian border this year. Add in an equal number that started hiking northward from the Mexican border three months ago, and that means a total of thirty hikers on the CDT this year. In contrast, we estimate over three thousand folks are hiking the AT and another three hundred hikers are tackling the PCT this year. The difference in numbers attests to the remoteness and route-finding challenges faced by hikers on this, the longest national scenic trail in the United States.

The next morning, after passing the flowered meadows of Josephine Lake, we climb past the waterfalls and escarpments of Cataract Creek back to the summit of the divide atop Piegan Pass. We are greeted by tourist-trained marmots eager to pose and beg for food. A strong westerly wind drives us to seek shelter beneath a lichen-encrusted boulder where we eat our lunches. Our walk down to the Going-to-the-Sun Highway is enlivened by a small herd of bighorn sheep and crowds of hurried day hikers. Crossing the famous Going-to-the-Sun-Highway I remember a conversation with a highway engineer I worked with on the Deschutes National Forest. He had spent much of his thirty year federal career working for the Park Service helping maintain this highway, but claimed that a warming climate and more rain and less snow made it a madman’s task. Increased erosion, tumbling boulders and regular traffic jams made his summer’s work clearing and repairing this scenic highway a nightmare. It was one that he was happy to escape.

We conclude our day by fording the waist-deep St. Mary’s River to reach Reynolds Creek campsite. Once again we clasp two hundred feet of aircraft cable, this one stretched head height across the ford. Nick joins us at our mosquito-plagued campsite. We gather wood to build a small fire to ward off the chill. He walked the same distance we did, but did not leave until the campground until long after lunch. Ah, youth! I pride myself in keeping up with Hmmm and then wonder how much she is slackening her pace for me.

Morning starts with yet another ford back across the ice-cold St. Mary’s River to regain the trail. We join dozens of day hikers at St. Mary and Virginia Falls and then have the trail to ourselves. Breakfast is at a viewpoint overlooking St. Mary’s Lake. I munch my granola with rehydrated powdered cow’s milk while Hmmm eats her dense Bavarian