I woke up early that morning so that I could eat a big breakfast and drink a lot of water (helps prevent hypothermia), and digest it all before I started hiking over Dawson Pass – the one that park ranger had warned me about. It was so, so cold. I remember dipping my water bottle into the icy glacier spring, then spending the next 20 minutes trying to get my hands warm again. The temperature was below freezing, and the thick cloud cover meant that it would take some time to warm up.

For some reason, backtracking back to Two Medicine (as the ranger suggested) didn’t feel like a reasonable option. I told myself that if it got really bad I could always turn back. So I started climbing up toward Dawson Pass.

That cliff face I slept next to on the previous day
Leaving the valley, heading into the unknown

As I climbed into the clouds, visibility dropped and I started getting pelted with wind and snow. I had all of my layers on, and I put all of my faith in my rain jacket to keep my down layer underneath from getting soaked.

I ran into a couple of particularly treacherous snow crossings on the way up - one was a steep slope of snow totally covering the hairpin turn of a switchback. Below I could see another 100 feet or so of sloping snow fading into the fog. No telling what could lie below. I strapped on my micro-spikes and went for it, my entire body quivering as I tried to carve my own switchback into the packed snow without looking down. Once on the other side, I collapsed out of relief and gulped down one of the absolutely disgusting energy gels I had bought the previous day.

I needed to maintain my body heat, so I wasn’t able to take the kind of break I wanted. I had to follow the ridge for about 4 miles until I came over the next pass. I was happy to be over the most treacherous snow traversal, but still anxious to get down the mountain and out of the snowstorm. Luckily, the path at the top of the ridge was mostly pretty non-treacherous. I remember singing loudly to keep myself company.

It had been a day since I’d laid eyes on another human – probably the longest I had ever gone in my whole life. In the shock of loneliness, everything around me became more personified. I wanted to talk to the rocks and trees and ask the sun to come out from behind the clouds.

Glacier lilies. Their bulbs are a major source of food for grizzly bears.

After following the trail for what seemed like too far, I made it to a sharp ridge where I lost the trail entirely and got lost in a maze of faint mountain goat paths. I backtracked three or four times, trying to find the critical point in-between where there was clearly a trail and where there was clearly not a trail. My compass had somehow gotten a big air bubble in it, so it was really difficult to get an accurate reading. I figured out that somehow I had missed the turn-off toward Pitamakan pass, and I had reached Cut Bank Pass, where the trail was totally obscured by a large snow field.

Panic started to set in – I needed to get down from this ridge and get warm. So I decided to backtrack until I found the right turn-off, or if I missed it, I would backtrack all the way back down to Two Medicine Campground.

While anxiously backtracking in thick fog with ~20-foot visibility, I saw the outline of a dog on the side of the hill directly above me: A coyote, its ears perked up in my direction. I froze, and it froze. We stared at each other for about 10 seconds then began moving again at exactly the same time, doing this careful inter-species do-si-do, Both of us aware of each other but carefully minding our own business. It was a beautiful moment of calm and awe in the middle of my growing panic.

I found the turn-off I had missed about half an hour after that. The trail was totally covered in a gently-sloping snow field, but just before the fog totally obscured my line of sight I could see a clear trail coming out the other side. I was so relieved that I ran across the snow and down the trail on the other side.

Finally descending out of the clouds.

The trail on the north side of Pitamakan pass was completely covered in snow for about a mile, as the CDT hikers had warned me the previous day. The only thing to guide me were the meandering footprints of past hikers. I gleefully ran/slid most of the way, trying to avoid the Tree wells. They didn’t look dangerously deep. But at the very end of the pass, I finally slid into one, bending my aluminum hiking pole in the process. I was able to bend it back at least enough so that it could still prop up my tent.

That afternoon passed fairly uneventfully. The first human I saw was a park ranger, and we chatted for a good 15 minutes. She was excited to hear about the coyote sighting. The sun came out while we were talking, and afterward I sat down on a rock to dry out my socks and have a late lunch. I camped at Atlantic Creek Campground that night with one formerly-Northbound CDT hiker.

That night, I noticed that my water bladder sprang a leak – just a pinhole in the corner of the bladder, which I had to hold in while I squeezed. Also, my Sawyer filter flow was down to a pitiful trickle because I had clogged it up by filtering tortellini water through it on my shakedown hike (don’t do this). The CDT hiker recommended that I bang the sawyer filter on a rock before backflushing it (also don’t do this). It didn’t really help, and I made a mental note to ask Peter to bring a new one for me.