Jack and Sophie at the Trailhead
My grand nephew, Jack, had been backpacking before, but this was to be his first one without a parent. Friends had suggested an trail recently added to the Scapegoat Wilderness Area and this was a chance to check it out. The weather was still "abnormally" hot, although I'm pretty confident it is our climate-change induced new normal.
I was impressed with the gear Jack had brought with him. His sleeping bag was super light — much lighter and less bulky than mine... I was envious. I have no idea what it weighed, but it took up half the space and weighed half what mine did. His sleeping pad was pretty spiffy too, more compact and probably lighter as well. Younger generation one, geezers zero.
I checked and the trailhead was easily within range for a round trip in our Rivian electric truck. We got an earlish start (for Jack and me) so we could start hiking before it got too hot. At the trailhead we made sure our water bottles were full, grabbed a last brownie or two and stashed the rest for our return. We were off at about 10:40.
It was 75°F when we turned off the highway, but 91°F by the time we started hiking. Sophie had Max's old doggie pack; it was her first back-packing trip too. Her pack was pretty light with only three (well two, really) days' worth of food. She got used to it pretty quickly.
The trail follows the north side of the creek for a mile and a half on a bench high above the water. The creek was crystal clear, with limestone ledges dropping into nice pools. Unfortunately, I had forgotten to give Sophie water at the trailhead, and she was clearly thirsty — she kept wanting to go over to the creek. I didn't want her jumping / scrambling down a half-cliff to the water and not being able to get back up, so we had to keep calling her back. I knew the trail crossed the creek up ahead, and after an hour or so we came to a ford where she could fill up. Jack said he was doing ok for water and I had a lot left too so we didn't squeeze any, and after a brief rest we continued on.
The first ford was too deep to cross and stay dry, so we changed to river shoes and waded across. Jack didn't bring hiking poles and I usually don't either, but this time I brought a pair thinking they might come in handy. We split them up, one for each of us.
We continued up river on the south bank.
But the river was low enough at the next ford so that previous parties had placed rocks and a log so you could walk across. It looked a little woogedy so I borrowed my hiking pole back from Jack, used both poles to cross, and dumped my pack on the other side. I took Jack's pack across, then he crossed using both poles.
It was pretty hot, I didn't know where we were going to camp, and we didn't want to run out of water. So once we were on the other side we got out the filter and squeezed our supplies full. Jack had a hydration pack and a water bottle, and I had two bottles.
Sophie is definitely a water dog, so there was zero chance her food left unprotected in her pack would stay dry. So we had packed it in ziplock bags and that worked well.
While filling our water Jack gave me a nudge and indicated with his eyes where to look and there was this nice butterfly. We managed to get a photo of it but I'm still not sure what it is. It may be a Mylitta Crescent. I found it by looking at this list of Montana butterflies. It don't think it was on this list of common butterflies of Montana, a nice resource since it shows both sexes and the caterpillars too, although it is missing some of the ventral (underside) views.
After another half-hour or so we came to a nice camp. Before settling in we dropped our packs and explored up the trail a bit in case there was a better camp farther up. There wasn't; just about everything upstream had been burned and only had small trees nearby. So we returned to our packs, crashed, and rested a bit before setting up camp.
Sophie started nosing around her pack as soon as we took it off, clearly wanting to get in there. Dona and I were on a trip once when Max unzipped one side of his pack and ate three days' worth of food. Previous users had put up a game pole, so we threw a line over it and hoisted up our food and Sophie's, out of reach of bears, dogs, and other critters.
It was still pretty hot, but having rested up a bit we decided to explore up and down the creek. Jack had a small stuffsack he could rig as a pack so I put it on and used it to carry some water.
It was hot enough I decided I needed to cool off and take a quick bath/rinse. I didn't stay in long; hot as the air was, the water was cold!
There was a small cascade / waterfall upstream, where we discovered a section of log floating there just waiting to go for a ride. So ... boys being boys ...
The trail forked just above camp so we crossed over and explored a bit on the south side of the creek.
Jack's back was a bit sore when we first got to camp, but after our creek exploring and a little rest he was better. There was a huge fire ring in camp, and he was pretty keen on trying to start a fire with a bow drill. I hunted around and tried to find a suitable bow, firestick material, friction block, top pressure block or rock, and some tinder. We each whittled a firestick and then I tried to get a fire going. Grrr... We got smoke, but no coal, so no fire. I think the wood I was using for the friction block wasn't hard enough. So in the end we used matches. As with many previously used campfire rings, this one had leftover trash in it. We brought most of it out with us.
We also had some handy benches previous users had made. They left too much bench hanging out past the end of the base logs, so when we forgot and sat down near the end the whole thing flipped up and dumped us. But hey, beggars can't be choosers.
I had Jack power up the Garmin In-Reach Mini and send out the "we're ok" message to Dona and his mom, then power it off to save the battery.
We cooked up some freeze-dried spaghetti for dinner, but Jack was pretty melancholy and not interested in eating much. A while later I rigged up the fly rod and we went fishing. We didn't catch anything, but Jack cheered up a bit. When we got back he ate more dinner plus dessert, and we enjoyed the alpenglow on the rock wall opposite camp.
We set out the tent ground-cloth as a tarp, as I was hoping to sleep under the stars. But when it came time to turn in the mosquitos had found us so we set up the tent. It's a good thing we did; by morning there were quite a few of them buzzing around outside. As soon as we crawled into our bags we had to get out and move the tent a bit because Jack found a rock right under him.
I was up before Jack and tried a little fishing, with no luck. Jack slept in and seemed a bit down when he got up; he only ate one oatmeal package. I got out the English muffins, butter and jam and he snarfed that down. Note to self for the menu next time! Afterwards he retired to the tent, commiserating with Little George and Hippo, two small stuffed pals he had brought. He said he was just tired and would be up for a hike in a bit. I wasn't sure what else I could do and felt a bit melancholy.
When he got up he was better. We decided to explore farther up the creek. I was hoping if we could catch some fish it might improve our outlook on life.
This time we took the right fork up onto a bench above the creek. Then came another fork marked by a metal fencepost; the map only showed one trail. I'm guessing the lower trail got flooded in high-water years. We took the right hand (upper) fork. We had to keep calling Sophie back because she wanted to go over the cliff towards the water; all of the side creeks we crossed were dry. There was a nice view of Caribou Peak up towards the head of the valley.
About three miles along the trail dropped back down to the creek, and the lower trail rejoined it there. We forded the creek, stopped to refill water, and decided to try fishing. It wasn't much good; there wasn't much water in the creek and not much cover. We did see a couple of small ones, though.
There were some interesting wildflowers around the creek. The one on the left I thought would be easy to find an id for, but so far I've come up empty. I forgot to get a picture of the leaves on the one on the right which makes it harder to identify. I think it could be any of these: Cow Parsnip (Heracleum lanatum) , Canby's Wild Lovage (Libusticum canbyl) , Lyall's Angelica (Angelica arguta) .
Jack sent out another message for practice and to mark how far up the creek we went, although it was pretty obvious from the map.
Before returning by the lower trail I soaked my shirt in the creek; I should have also soaked my hat. I tried to get Jack to do the same but he wasn't interested. The trail was shaded part of the way from young trees and shrubs so it was a bit cooler. At one point we spooked something big out of the trees and shrubs around us, but the foliage was too thick to see as it fled up the slope to the bench above. My guess would be a mule deer.
Back at camp we cooked up some Pasta Primavera with Salmon for dinner. Jack ate pretty well, and we talked a bit about the upcoming float on the Missouri, which he seemed pretty interested in.
Towards evening we headed back up, crossed over, and did some fishing. Jack got some hits, then for some reason got a bloody nose. He's had them before so knows how to deal with them. While he was doctoring his nose I caught a small rainbow.
There was nice light on the rock wall opposite camp as evening turned to twilight.
Jack got another bloody nose that night. It took a while to stop, but eventually we got to sleep. The next morning we had a liesurely breakfast, packed up and headed out.
We arrived at the trailhead in good shape, popped open the truck, and snarfed down cookies and water. Sophie was a bit tuckered out and happy to have some water too.
Back at home we learned neither of the two messages we sent arrived. After a little experimenting I determined that:
So ... turn it on, write the message, hit send, then wait for the sent sound. Be prepared to wait several minutes. Terrible design...