No Name
I woke up at dawn that morning to set off on a tiny 5-mile day. Because of the park’s permit system and the heavy CDT traffic, I had an awkwardly short day off the CDT followed by two longer days. I would re-join the CDT by hiking over Dawson Pass and Pitamakan Pass on the second day.
The ranger at the station the previous day warned me that Dawson Pass still had some serious snow hazards, and she didn’t have any reports of people hiking over it that season. And I would be hiking on a bad weather day. She encouraged me to backtrack to Two Medicine and hike up Pitamakan Pass from the southeast the next day if the weather was looking bad. This scared me enough that I decided to buy heavier gloves at the camp store near the ranger station. I waited a few hours there until the store opened, chatting with some day-hikers, and picked up some very warm wool mittens. And some energy gels in case I started getting hypothermia (this is the only time in my life that I have ever bought or consumed energy gels.)
If I had known that the ranger in the camp store was the last human I’d see in another 30 hours or so, I might have given him a hug or something.
I started slowly working my way around Two Medicine Lake and up toward No Name Lake. I didn’t want to hike too quickly and then sit in my tent for the entire evening, but then it started snowing…
And with that, I decided to book it to my campsite and snuggle up in my quilt. I basically laid in my tent and hid from the cold for the entire evening. I was reading Michael Parenti’s Blackshirts & Reds on my phone, but at some point I realized with dismay that I had accidentally left my phone battery bank at the hostel in East Glacier. Shoot. No more ebooks. So I shut off my phone and waited to fall asleep.
No Name Lake is bordered by this massive 2000-foot cliff face - I tried to get a picture of it, but it was impossible to capture anything meaningful in a single frame. I took a picture of it the next day while climbing out of the valley, but it doesn’t communicate the absolute awe I felt the first time I caught a glimpse of it across the lake.
Throughout the night, I periodically woke up to the anxiety-inducing sound of boulders chipping off the cliff and slamming into the rocks below.