Turn back the clock to August 2011. I was recently unemployed and couldn’t decide between hiking the CDT from Glacier to Yellowstone or spending a few weeks in the beautiful lake country of Northern Michigan where my girlfriend was stationed for the summer so I decided to pick a little bit of both before putting my nose to the grindstone to find another job.
I found an airline ticket out of Salt Lake City back to Michigan and planned my trip south from Bozeman. I planned to do a couple things between here and there in order to appease my hiking desires prior to spending quality time on Lake Michigan. I signed up for a Continental Divide Trail Alliance (read my Sep. 2011 trip report) volunteer trail building session in the Lionhead area of Gallatin National Forest. We spent a few days digging tread, re-building a failing culvert, and trimming overhead vegetation during the day and eating excellent grub and enjoying cold ones in the evening. I highly recommend a CDT or other volunteer project as it gets you to some beautiful country and gives you the opportunity to give back to the organizations that maintain the trails we know and love.
Conveniently located between my volunteering session outside of Yellowstone and the airport I was making my way toward in Salt Lake City is a sleepy little burg on the quiet Western front of the Tetons – Driggs, ID. Infamous “lighten up” NOLS instructor, graphic artist, and all around good guy Mike Clelland spends his days here and I pinged him on my way down to see if he’d be into an ultralight 24 hour jaunt up into the hills outside his home. I arrived in the afternoon and we threw together some grub and gear and drove a short little distance to one of Mike’s favorite trailheads just up the road from his house.
Mike and I instructed a few sessions of the Backpacking Light Wilderness Trekking School together in ’09 and I hadn’t seen him much since, nor gone camping with him. What a great time it was practicing what we preached purely for the enjoyment of the sport we loved. We packed really light with no shelters as the weather up near the Teton Crest was expected to be precip-free. We connected a couple trails together with a little off-trail jaunt with some of the finest craggy views the lower 48 has to offer. Our super light sleeping bags were enough to keep us warm until just a bit before dawn so we awoke from our sleep atop a large expanse of rock long before the sun crept up over the Grand Teton and high tailed it back down to the valley. Mike to get back to his freelance work and me to hit the road to SLC.
Michigan ended up being a total blast and a few years later I made that gal I was visiting my wife – so a trip there was well worth it!