Bob Marshall Wilderness: Chapter 2

Aug/ 8/ 2017

BEFORE BED LAST NIGHT:

Anonymous: “I ain't worried about my alarm, because I’ll get up at 6:30, No question.”*

(*- PROBABLY NO ONE WILL ACTUALLY ADMIT TO SAYING THIS… BUT I KNOW SOMEONE DID [I think it was someone from Montana.]) Also, this statement was paraphrased.

There was a rule we all agreed to as we laid down to sleep last night… NO FARTING! “If you need to fart, then get your hind end out of here.” I don’t think I've ever slept in a tent that was better suited for ventilation then this tent. Every night before bed, we would gather everyone's stuff together and put it under the tent canopy. You may have guessed by now, that means our tent was uncovered and all that was between us and the bugs of this world was a layer of mesh at the top of the tent. This would have been a massive plus at night for stargazing, but unfortunately, with forest fires only a few hours drive away. Most of the stars were deemed invisible to our eyes behind the smoky haze above our night time resting spots.

Once morning arrived, and everyone decided to loosen up and get our stuff out of the tent. Someone got up and headed for the tent entrance, and stuck his rump out the door and gave a fart. “OK, that's not what we meant!” Someone said.

Before our trip began Jon bought a water purifier. If you never had to use a pump for clean water before, have you lived? I submit that you have not! Let me explain how long this process took. If you need water you were gonna need to sit there and pump for a good 5 minutes. Once you had finished, you would be tired enough that you would start to drink that water… and a small tear would roll down your check once you realized that you had to start all over again.

It didn’t take long for us to seemingly see Dwylin age before our eyes. By this morning, one would think Dwylin was the ripe old age of 50. We wondered how he was going to react to walking another 8 miles today. He continued this way until we started our hike when his feet would loosen up. Dwylin took 3 band-aids and two Ibuprofen or as our friend Bruno from Ohio calls them, “Ibua-profain”.

We made our breakfast, packed up and headed out around 9:30 am for another 8 miles of hiking. We all agreed on a few ground rules as we left, we needed to drink more water, and rest more, as well as eat more during our hike. Then off in the distance, we heard a HOWLLLLL!!! but not just one, but a couple of them. Dan looked up ominously from packing his bag and said, “wolves”. Dan guessed that they were within a half-mile of our campsite. This, of course, made Dwylin, who was at least 45 years old by now, even more nervous about the day ahead.

Winding in and out of the hills and valleys we made a good pace for ourselves. We found animal paw prints and fresh scat all over the pathway that we were navigating around. The views were huge and wide and at moments there was major vegetation and steep hills. Our pace wasn’t just good, but it seemed to be absolutely spectacular. We ended up going 8 miles in 3¼ hours, but let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves.

The first couple miles didn’t have much to offer for memorable dialog, and indeed most of the hiking was that way. Each day of hiking we passed people on the trail on their way back. Every once and awhile we would get information out of them and try to figure out how much farther we had to go.

Finally, we reach that day's destination, Big Salmon Lake was here and so was everyone else! We must have seen around 20 people at or walking through this point of the trail. I distinctly remember someone with an Australian or New Zealand accent, but it didn’t take long for most of them to head on out. We had made it 20 miles by this point and it didn’t take long for the bags to come off and for some of the boys to start playing “Pocket Rockets” (Poker).

Poker is a favorite travel game for some of the boys, but playing with rocks instead of chips made the games more fun to watch (playing with only 10 rocks really made the games go faster). The baby of the group, Caleb, had never played poker before, and usually, this means quick defeat unless your name is Caleb. Apparently, it is just as effective to be lucky instead of being good. One of the early hands Caleb bet all the way through to the end with only Landon in his way. He threw the cards down certain of defeat, but everyone playing yelled in surprise. Apparently, he had a straight and didn’t know it! Which was good enough to win that game.

This was the first place on our trip that the smoke added to the surroundings. The lake is 5 miles long and was absolutely gorgeous. Most of the guys decided that the fishing on the shore of the lake was not good enough. So everyone but Dwylin got their pack rafts out and we had our first experience of blowing up the rafts. It was a surprisingly very simple process and the boys made their way around the lake to find fish.

Now while everyone one was out in the lake fishing, Dwylin stayed by camp to “heal his joints”. Dan kept looking into the shore and noticed that Dwylin, who we thought was going to swim and heal up, was just standing waist-deep for at least a half-hour. (Dwylin may or may not have been afraid of the cold water, but who's to say.) In due time the fishermen got back to shore, but they couldn’t see Dwylin anywhere. Then they heard a voice from somewhere saying, “Did you catch anything?” Looking around, all that could be seen was a lone head protruding from the water. It was indeed the head of Dwylin. The water was a lot warmer then the river was the night before, but all in all Dwylin couldn’t stop shivering. By the time he got out of the water, our best guess is that he was in the water for a good hour.

Talking and laughing helped the evening progress nicely. Otherwise not a lot of other memorable things happened to my knowledge, I’m afraid. As the evening continued no one could decide if we wanted to use the tent or not. Finally, three hero’s stubbornly decided to set up the tent, but there was literally only one place we could put the tent. Everyone got in and went to bed, and let it be known, the only thing harder then the ground we slept on has to be concrete!