Meredith and I were heading opposite directions, so we said goodbye. My exact words were, “…maybe someday we’ll be hiking a trail in the same direction.” It felt like we should leave it up to fate.

By this point, I was starting to get in the swing of things. I often tell people that it takes only about a week to get in the hiking mindset, or what I call “hiker brain”. For me, it feels like my brain slows down, processes less information, gains more presence, loses the ability to feel bored. My apprehension about the difficulty of long-term hiking was being replaced by excitement and gratitude.

My goal was to make it to Many Glacier Campground by the end of the day. I had sent a package of food to the camp store there, and I had precisely one day of food left. To get there, I just had to climb over one pass and hike another 12 miles or so.

Climbing Piegan pass was fairly straightforward, although some snow cover on the north side made it hard to find the trail at times. The views were mostly obscured by the cloud I was hiking into.

Leaving the valley I had been hiking through for the past couple of days...
...and onto the next one.

The valley on the north side of the pass had much more dramatic scenery than the one I had just left. Waterfalls plummeted from massive vertical cliff faces in every direction, merging into fast-moving streams that cut across the trail. A couple of these streams were close to waist-deep, and I can still remember the physical shock of plunging through ice-cold rushing water. I had been hiking happily for a few hours though, and my body felt resilient enough to generate its own heat, even on a chilly day like this one.

The trail to Many Glacier is a very heavily-used equestrian trail, unfortunately, so I spent the second part of my day trudging through gloopy mud and horse poop, all waterlogged from almost a week of rain. I made it to the Many Glacier Hotel, which is pretty, but I don’t even have any pictures of it because I absolutely booked it out of there to avoid the Bad Tourist Vibes. The camp store and campground were a short roadwalk away.

The sun was finally coming out as I got to the camp store, so I took off my shoes and laid all of my down gear out to dry in the parking lot while I went in to retrieve my package. I also got a pay phone card so that I could call Peter and ask them to buy me a new battery pack. I was surprised to find out that the store had (extremely spotty) WiFi, so I sat there charging my phone while also messaging Peter, drinking coffee… binging on industrial comforts.

That night at the campground, I met a CDT hiker who had hiked the PNT in 2017. The first ex-PNT hiker I met! They gave me some general PNT advice and told me about their terrible experience doing the Lion’s Head bushwhack in Idaho (they started too late and had to find a place to camp in the middle of the bushwhack, in grizzly territory). That wasn’t exactly comforting, but it was hard for me to imagine messing up that badly (skip to the Kettle Crest Bushwhack to read about how I almost messed up that badly).