Even Good Trips Must Come to an End

Dana, Mark, Mike, Sam, and Eric
Dana, Mark, Mike, Sam, and Eric

All trips must eventually come to an end as this one pictured did.  Dana, Mark, Mike, Sam, and Eric spent the better part of a week on the Box Canyon and Upsidedown Trails in the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness in September 2009.  We hiked, camped, fished, climbed mountains, read, relaxed, had campfires, talked, and generally enjoyed each other’s company. Like all good things though it eventually had to come to an end. We’re a good bunch of planners though so we made sure to have beers stashed at the car for trip’s end.

Superior Hiking Trail, Sunday, May 08, 2005

Sonju Lake, May 2005

From my Trail Journal, Sunday, 2005-05-08, Sonju Lake

The sun hangs in the sky, lazy. The choir of creatures surrounding me don’t mind me being here and have just struck up a tune. A choir with tens of thousands of players, no composer and no sheet music. A jazz combo of epic proportions. The first few mosquitos of the summer buzz solo parts in my ear. They are huge.

The Art of Glissading

Wikipedia defines glissading as the

“..voluntary act of descending a steep slope of snow in a controlled manner either for the sheer thrill of the ride or to bypass tedious scree.”

During the summer of 2009 I co-guided a course in ultralight backpacking for the Backpacking Light Wilderness Trekking School alongside Andrew Skurka and Glen Van Peski in the beautiful Wind River Range of Wyoming. One afternoon as we were descending along painfully slow scree fields (I believe off Wind River Peak) we opted to speed things up and glissade some perfectly pitched snowfields.

View the embedded video “Glissading in the Wind River Range” on Vimeo.

Sling It and Swing It

Mike throws the bear rope
Mike throws the bear rope in the Beartooths

Southwest Montana is home to wildlife aplenty.  Grizzly bears and black bears have free roam over a landscape that is millions and millions of acres and as such when people opt to cohabitate with these big critters certain precautions must be taken.  Above is a photo of Mike beginning the process of preparing a food hang called the PCT Method, described in the article Bear Bag Hanging Techniques at Backpacking Light

Backpacking the Spanish Peaks of the Madison Range

The crew I was part of in college refers to ourselves as Flavor Country and a small subset of this crew has been taking an annual backpacking trip since somewhere around 2002 or 2003.  I and my roomate (also a part of Flavor Country) have the fortune of living in a place where there is ample and awesome backpacking so a couple of the guys from the Midwest came out to visit last week and we hit the trail for four days and three nights.

There was some big ol’ glacial erratic along the trail.
We found ourselves way up in the high country singing “Misty Mountain Hop”.
Then it snowed.  Eric was so afraid he had to close his eyes.
Someone left a metal grill at the site so we steamed some beef sticks in a sardine can.
It was pretty much exquisitely beautiful. 
Eric constructed the best firepit ever.  ‘Twas a shame to practice LNT and tear it down in the morning.
At trip’s end we had to fight Jax dog for the last tall boy of Old Swill.  

Backpacking Light – Wilderness Trekking School – WS1-LWB 2010

Over a weekend in late July and early August Chris Wallace and I had the opportunity to instruct a group of excited students in the ways and (dare I say) art of ultralight backpacking.  We were working on behalf of the Backpacking Light Wilderness Trekking School and operated a three day course out of Jackson Hole Wyoming in the Bridger Teton National Forest. 

Chris and I have had the opportunity of backpacking together previously and regularly exchange gear-related chats via various Internet channels so I know what his strengths were.  He is a gear and nutrition nerd, plain and simple.  Ask him a question about a piece of gear and he will provide you a well-researched and fact-based explanation of it.  Ask him a question about caloric density of food or what he suggests as a ratio of protein to fat to carbs and he’ll have an answer for that as well. 

Chris provides a good balance to my style which is a bit looser.  I know gear also but from a more theoretical point of view basing my knowledge more on fabrics generalities and broad design elements rather than specific brands.  I’m also blessed with having spent myriad days in the backcountry of the Rocky Mountains and having walked thousands of trail miles with only a map as my guide.

I was able to offer up to our students a light-hearted, humorous attitude with an anecdote for just about every situation and Chris was able to provide qualitative, verifiable data for any and all serious questions posed by our more technical students.

The students who enrolled in our course were of a broad background.  We had semi-retirees from Florida, vagabonds from Wyoming, alpine enthusiasts from Oregon, and a solo-trekker from Quebec.  The students were well-versed in a good chunk of info regarding the ultralight backpacking ethos but all yearned for more and also particularly wished to put these techniques into practice in the backcountry and have help doing such from instructors like Chris and myself who’ve done so many times.  According to post-course feedback we were successful. 

But enough with all this writing – – let’s look at some photos because we all know they’re worth a thousand words.  For full photo set please visit my Flickr photo page.

Teton Mountain Range
Gossamer Gear Spinn Twinn

 Charlie and the rising sun.
Have you been hiking near the Tetons?  You really should you know.
 I can see your Tetons from here.

Splitboarding and Backpacking in July

Friday, July 9th, 2010 I walked out of the office at 17:00, was home and had a lightweight gear set-up for both backpacking and splitboarding packed and in the trunk of my Subaru by 18:40.  My destination was the Pine Creek trailhead in the Northwest corner of the Absaroka Mountain Range and I arrived by 19:40.  I knew daylight would leave me sometime between 21:30 and 22:00 so I shouldered my load and high-tailed it onto the five mi. (eight km) Pine Creek Lake trail.

Being an ultralight backpacker it was strange to have the added weight of snowboard, boots, avalanche safety tools, and ice axe.  The moving was a bit slower but it felt good to be moving as day slowly turned to night, temperatures dropped, and I got further and further into the Absaroka Beartooth Wilderness.

I hiked until 21:30 and stopped to make use of the last bits of daylight to set up my minimal camp consisting of an eVent bivy sack, synthetic sleeping quilt, and torso-length sleeping pad.  I strung my bear rope, set up my alcohol stove and prepared some instant mashed potatoes as the sun set over the Gallatin Mountain Range and Paradise Valley to the West.  Sleep came to me by 22:00. 

I awoke at 06:00 and was hiking within twenty minutes, chomping on an energy bar and sipping water from my hydration system.  About 30 minutes of hiking brought me to the end of the trail and into the snowy bowl that is Pine Creek Lake.  A large iceberg was still floating in the lake and the cirque held a fair amount of snow – – a soothing site for me as I had lugged many pounds of snowboard gear into terrain of which I knew little about the snow conditions other than my previous trip two years before.

By 09:30 I had summited Black Mountain (read Summit Post profile) using methods of walking, skinning, and ski crampons.  I was slightly undernourished having had only one energy bar and one GU but I made decent time and was in great spirits.  I spent a few minutes on the relatively snow-free summit and then descended to the large snow bowl that I planned to ride.

The snowboarding was quite delicious and I was able to get approximately 1,000 vertical feet (304 m) of riding in.  The top 800′ (244 m) was wonderful corn snow that didn’t grab the board in the least and allowed for me to arc some nice, large GS turns.

Proceeding past a flat spot at the bottom of the large bowl and sliding over a little roll put me onto a different aspect that consisted of some fun slaloming through large boulders in snow of a slushy quality for about 200′ (61 m) vertical.

I swapped out the snowboard gear for shorts, trailrunners, sunscreen, took a few swigs of the refreshing snowmelt water that was all around me and headed down the trail.  Arrival back at my Subaru was around 13:30 leaving me plenty of time to return home and shower before heading into downtown Bozeman for the bicycle sprints portion of the Tour of Bozeman race series.

Porcupine Mountains Wilderness State Park – Summit Peak Loop

This trip took place October 6th – 8th, 2007
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My buddy Mark and I have been backpacking together for the past seven years or so and in 2007 we planned a trip to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula (c’mon up to da U.P., eh!).  The Upper Peninsula or UP as it’s commonly referred to is home to some nice wildland – particularly Porcupine Mountains Wilderness State Park.  We planned for a four day weekend and did a great – albeit rainy – loop within the confines of the park. 

Our trip route was:

  • N. Mirror Lake Trail
  • Little Carp River Trail
  • Lake Superior Trai
  • Big Carp River Trail

I was very pleased with how the photos Mark and I took that weekend turned out.  The fall colors and wet landscape came together for some very soft and pleasing imagery.  Following are a few of my favorites.  View the entire set within the pages of my Porcupine Mountains set on Flickr. 

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Sam on a rock

Fall colors

Sun and water

Mark, Sam, jackasses

Silver Bay to Section 13 on the Superior Hiking Trail

This trip took place April 20-22nd, 2007.  Participants were Andy, Logan, and Sam

Logan, Bean Lake

April 20th – Friday night we arrived at the Silver Bay trailhead just before dark. We were able to move the 3.5 or so miles to the Bear Lake campsite with no difficulties. We ran into some fellow Duluthians at the trailhead but they were camping at a closer spot and we lost track of them.

Arrival at camp was quick and efficient as all three of us are experienced backpackers. Tents were erected, dinner prepared and a comfortable fire built just in time for the “alpine-glow” to be replaced with darkness.

Feet, Bear Lake

April 21st – Morning was just as efficient and gratefully so as the rain began to fall just as we were closing the tops of our packs. We hit the trail as the chilly drops of rain sent their wake up messages to our bodies. We hiked to Tettegouche State Park where Andy had to make his departure to meet some family members for a backpacking trip elsewhere along the trail but Logan and Sam continued on the rest of the sixteen odd miles to Section 13 camp.

Section 13 Cliffs

A chilly but relaxing evening found us cooking some warm grub and chatting about the old days back in Montana followed by an early bedtime. It had been awhile since either of us had done any real trail miles so we were feeling the sixteen miles.

ULA Equipment Conduit

April 22nd – Morning came with no real pain and we quickly packed for the short mile and a half back down to the highway and Logan’s waiting Jeep. We were in Duluth eating wild rice burgers at the Brewhouse by 11:30.

View entire trip photo set on Flickr.

Revisiting Old Trips – Superior Hiking Trail, MN, USA

Sam above Duluth, MN with Lake Superior in the background
Sam Haraldson above Duluth, MN and Lake Superior, October 2005

I’ve decided to take all the trips I’ve documented on samh.net/backpacking and create blog posts about them here so that I can have one all-encompassing trip reports website. The majority of these posts will be short and focus on photos but others such as my trip reports for my thru-hikes are quite lengthy.

This particular post you are reading now will cover two trips, one from July 2006 and another from September 2006 – both on the Superior Hiking Trail on the North Shore of Lake Superior in Minnesota.

I took an overnight trip in July 2006 into Crosby-Manitou State Park along the Superior Hiking Trail. I had really only begun practicing ultralight backpacking the year previous and was getting into the process of trying out new gear and techniques. In the photos below you can see my heavy nylon tarp, makeshift nordic ski poles, Equinox “About-a-Pound” pack, DIY Tyvek stuff sack, REI WPB bivy, and Gatorade water bottle.

Tarp and bivy camping, Crosby Manitou
Tarp and bivy camping, Crosby Manitou

In September of 2006 I had acquired a Golite Poncho Tarp but was still rockin’ the same nordic ski poles and bivy. I did a lot of volunteer trail maintenance and a lot of backpacking that summer. It was wonderful exploring the North Shore of Lake Superior and re-visiting the SHT again after having thru-hiked it on a visit there in 2005. On my hike into Sonju Lake I was surprised to find fellow trail-maintainer and friend, Kurt with two buddies who were out on a multi-day trip.

Poncho tarp and bivy camping Sonju Lake