Yaak, MT
The trail going over Bunker Hill was pretty overgrown and eroded. At times it was a struggle to keep myself from slipping off the side of the trail. At the top, I lost the trail entirely and had to do a fair amount of compass/map guesswork to get back on. I was listening to Earl Sweatshirt’s noisy and disorienting new-ish album, Some Rap Songs.
I caught a hitch pretty quickly once I made it down the mountain to Yaak River Road. Downtown Yaak consists of two bars: The explicitly-racist “Dirty Shame Saloon” (confederate flag flying out front), and the probably-still-racist-but-not-as-proud-of-it “Yaak River Tavern”. Someone at the bar told me that every year they have a crawdad festival, and everyone comes and gets shitfaced and eats tons of crawdads, and it always ends in a fight.
I was surprised and excited to see Sam, Don, Morning Star, Cookie Monster, Cooper, and Maddie there! A veritable mob of PNT hikers. They had all ended up spending the night in Yaak, and they were visibly refreshed . I hadn’t seen Cooper and Maddie since Glacier National Park, so I updated them on Hobbes leaving me. Sam and Don were now called Bugs and Moose, trail names that I think had been bestowed upon them by Cookie Monster and Morning Star.
Cooper and Maddie actually ended up getting off-trail the next day. Maddie’s feet were totally wrecked, like covered in painful sores and blisters, and neither of them were having enough fun to justify the pain. I think the story goes that they hiked out of Yaak to their campsite, finally ready to get back on trail, and Cooper realized that he left his tent rainfly back in Yaak. And that was the final straw.
In any case, it was so great to hang out with some other humans there. I picked up the box that I shipped from Eureka, took a quick $2(?) shower, and moved out. Some guy at the mercantile named Shane gave me, Bugs, Moose, Cookie Monster, and Morning Star a ride out to the forest road (0186P), and we all camped together that night (0189P). I felt so happy camping with other people around after all the solitude of the previous week and a half or so.
That evening, I was looking at the map and The Book Of Tim for the next day, and I noticed the Northwest Peak alternate route, which is described in the guidebook as “Not to be missed”. I didn’t want Tim to make me feel guilty for missing another scenic alternate, so I decided I had to hike a long day tomorrow to make it to the lookout cabin.