I woke up at 4am and it wasn’t raining. It hadn’t rained at all since the previous evening. But the sun had gone down on a wet meadow and the night had been very cold. In other words, conditions were ideal for everything in my body-warmed tent to be coated in condensation.
So the morning started with toweling off the ceiling and inside of the rainfly. The wet socks I had hung up were still soaked, of course, and so were my boots. When it came time in the packing up process to put them on, it was mere minutes before my toes were painfully cold. That pain continued all throughout packing up, while I eagerly looked forward to getting started hiking so I could warm up.
Then I looked at the map and saw that I was going to need more water to get through a 17 mile dry stretch. I scooped some out of the creek and started it filtering, then found myself running in place and jumping up and down with my hands in my coat pockets while the filtering seemed to just drag on forever. The pain in my toes was only reducing to the extent I was losing feeling in them, and my fingers were starting to ache as well. Eventually, I have gave up on letting the filtration finish and just tossed the dirty reservoir in my bag with water still in it so I could start. I started up the trail around a quarter to 6.
After a half mile, the top of the first steep hill, my toes had already warmed up to stop hurting and I was warm enough to stop and take off the jacket. I also took the opportunity to put up my headlamp, which I hadn’t actually needed once I started hiking because twilight had already begun.
The morning started with a climb of about 2000 feet to within sight of the summit of Taylor Mountain over the course of less than 10 miles. It wasn’t a continuous climb though. Rather, there would be a short steep climb followed by a short drop, then repeat, mostly through wet grassy meadows. As it was cloudy all morning, the sun couldn’t dry the grass, and so my boots, my socks, and my feet stayed wet the whole time.
On the second short climb, I met Hot Lips and Caveman, nobos who started in April, coming down and got an update on the sobos in front of me. I didn’t know either of the names I heard. No surprises there. I knew it was not a popular section and that everyone I knew before was long gone by now. If you’re wondering, yes, Hot Lips does bear a passing resemblance to Loretta Swit as she looks now.
I stopped at the summit of the next hill for my first morning break. It was a great view, but I wished it was less cloudy.
After one more little climb, I finally came steeply down to join the road that zigzagged up the side of Mount Taylor. This was the longest single climb of the day, rising more than a thousand feet in about 3 miles. It was a really easy climb in terms of grade and slope, but it was an hour straight of relentless climbing. I didn’t stop for a break until I was nearly at the highest point of the trail, just below the peak. I had finished 9.5 miles by 10:30 and was already very near the highest elevation I would reach the whole day.
It was still fairly cool, breezy, overcast, damp. My feet were still soaked. But soon after I started walking again, a thick fog rolled in over the mountain ridge. Passing through a low-hanging cloud, I couldn’t see more than two dozen feet in front of me. Soon, I saw a silhouette pop up behind a ridge and fade into view. I stopped my podcast and took my headphones out in prep for a conversation.
It was Mooch, another nobo nearing the northern end of the trail. He didn’t have much interesting to say about the trail behind him, so I gave him some news about the trail behind me. He didn’t seem in quite the hurry as the two earlier had. I wasn’t either. I had a pretty good pace going.
There isn’t too much to say about the remainder of the day. It was more downhill than up from this point. The sun came out enough before lunch that I could change my wet socks for ones that were now only slightly damp from riding outside my pack when I stopped to eat.
I took water out of a nice little creek just before dinner time, and submerged a boot entirely in mud trying to get to it. I guess that’s what they’re for.
I stopped for dinner near Lillian Lake, and while stopped I got to swap back from the slightly damp socks to the others that had completely dried outside my pack. As the grass dried, so had my boots, so my feet could finally be completely dry while I walked. I tried to give my towel some time to dry in the sun, but dinner didn’t take long enough to make a dent in that amount of moisture.
It also hadn’t been able to dry the slippery mud in the trail where it was shaded by trees. The next mile after supper was a descent in such mud. The mud was just the right consistency to preserve a set of perfectly clear bear tracks that had taken that same trail ahead of me sometime earlier that day, presumably not too long before. I continued seeing those tracks for the next couple of miles until I decided to stop for the night.
I had come to a crossing of Hell Roaring Creek that couldn’t be done without wet feet, and while there was a large clear meadow on the near side, there didn’t seem to be any good camping on the far side. Since it was already time to knock off for the evening, I decided to save the crossing for the morning. I spent the next ten minutes wandering around the meadow areas looking for a good, clear, level spot before finally settling for something somewhat imperfect but not rocky and only slightly lumpy. There I made camp and turned in after checking the weather. No rain predicted for the night, some chance of scattered showers the following evening. Should be another good day of hiking.
Total miles: 22.8
Distance to West Yellowstone: 37.9 miles
