The sickly scent of manure seemed to cling to the humidity inside my tent. I groggily packed up, ate a breakfast of oats alone in the clearing surrounded by cow pies, and filtered some water upstream of the tracks. I couldn’t wait to get out of the cattle-dominated lowlands and back up into the mountains. The cold spring water of western Montana felt like a distant dream.

I set off for an uneventful morning road walk, wihch turned quickly into a hot slog. I stopped about 6 miles in (0504P) to scramble under barbed wire for some warm, algae-flavored creek water flowing through a culvert beneath the road, and took the opportunity to slip out of my leggings and into my shorts.

My progress was stopped about another mile in by a massive herd of cows near a clearing. A woman roared past me on a four-wheeler, herding the cows into the clearing before signalling at me to move through.

I hit the Sweat Creek Picnic Area on Route 20 (0510P) around lunchtime. I was wandering around the parking lot searching for a shady spot to eat when I got startled by the sound of someone calling out to me. “Hey, man!” It was Bugs and Moose! I couldn’t believe I had caught up to them. They’d just resupplied for a second time in Republic and hitched back to the trail. We ate lunch together and chatted about our respective adventures before filling up our water and heading out. Moose informed me that in about 20 miles we’d be hiking past a restaurant that served biscuits and gravy, which became a kind of fixation for the next day.

We hiked in full sun along Trail 302, a quick 1500-foot climb and descent. The trails were faint and sometimes confusing – We lost the trail a few times and had to backtrack, sometimes with the help of Bugs’s GPS app. Moose and I found a water cistern near a marked spring, and nearly dipped some water out of it before we saw the dead rodent in the bottom.

At the bottom of the long descent, the trail merged into a forest road, part of which had been wrongfully claimed as private property. We came out behind a large gate adorned with skulls and PRIVATE PROPERTY signs. Intimidating signs decorated the rest of the forest road – YOU’RE IN MY SIGHTS with pictures of assault rifles and crosshairs. Some hiker chatter had warned us about this “Deliverance road”, and advised that we move through as quickly as possible. Per Tim Youngbluth’s trail guide:

The next few miles are the creepiest "Deliverance/Hills Have Eyes" area on the entire PNT, by far. Yard signage does not make one feel very welcome. Move on through.

At some point I ended up splitting off from Bugs and Moose. I tanked up on water at a culvert and high-tailed it off of the forest road, with two dogs barking and following me from a distance. It was now evening, and I was alone and needed a place to camp. I tried waiting a while for Bugs and Moose, but then decided to just keep moving until I found a spot. I was exhausted after the 26-mile hike, and my feet were aching from the long roadwalks.

The “camping spot” I found was probably one of the worst of the entire hike – A tiny gravel shoulder on a bend of the paved Toroda Creek Road. I hoped that the reflective tags on my tent would be enough to keep any passing cars from hitting me. Every time a car approached the bend that night, I woke up with my heart pounding, convinced that it was heading straight for me.