I woke up later than I expected to that morning, and packed up my tent quickly so no one would see me camped on what was most likely private property. I chatted with Peter, who was still lying groggily in their hammock, and headed down the road to the Polebridge Mercantile.

The Mercantile gives away free cinnamon buns to PNT hikers, and I was quick to capitalize on the opportunity. I sat happily on a rocking chair on the porch for about an hour, drinking coffee and petting the store cats.

Two sporty-looking adults and a child, all with matching hats, walked up and asked me if I was a PNT hiker. I didn’t parse them as thru-hikers; they looked too clean and put-together. It turns out that I had run into Buddy Backpacker, the youngest person ever to complete complete a Triple Crown (thru-hiking the AT, PCT, and CDT). And “Buddy’s Mom”, and “Buddy’s Dad”. Those are their trail names, unfortunately.

Buddy’s Dad gave me my own personal Buddy Backpacker sticker and the three of them trotted off, leaving me a little bit dazed and bewildered. Peter came down the road a few minutes later and I told them about Buddy Backpacker, which activated their competitive spirit. So we left and started heading up the forest road. This feels like it was the start of the “real” PNT: No more perfectly-maintained national park trails, no more signage. Just strange forest roads and rough trails, with little real-life confirmation of the PNT’s existence.

We hiked up the road together for a fairly unventful 5 miles or so, and the whole time Peter was wrestling with their decision to keep hiking. We sat down to have lunch, and Peter decided right there that they were going to turn back.

This wasn’t incredibly surprising to me, but it was still a huge bummer. I hiked alone all the way through Glacier and loved it, but I had been looking forward to being with Peter again. This was a huge change of plans, and it felt like I was losing something. We hugged each other goodbye. I was sobbing. We turned away from each other, hiking down the road in opposite directions.

I continued on, feeling a lot of fear and uncertainty - I didn’t know if I could do this whole thing alone, and I wasn’t convinced that I would meet other people on the trail besides Buddy Backpacker and his parents (no offense).

I was still crying ten minutes later when I came around a bend in the road and saw a large brown lump 50-100 feet ahead of me. It saw me too - its round ears perked up in my direction. My first grizzly sighting! It ran off the road into the forest, gaining the high ground on me. I was stunned and terrified. I waited a few minutes and started speed-walking down the road, singing “Please Don’t Rip My Throat Out, Mr. Bear” at the top of my lungs. Just around the next bend, I ran into the Buddy Backpacker Trio and gave them a quick life update: “Hobbes just left me, and then I saw a grizzly bear”.

For the rest of the day, I was just trying to hike through my loneliness. I had to stop every once in a while to cry. The road turned into a “trail”, which was really just an old decommissioned road bed, and a few miles later joined the Whitefish Divide Trail, more of an actual trail. A storm started rolling in and I finished the last couple miles of my hike in the rain. I set up in the rain at Red Meadow Lake (C74), a nice little NFS campground. I met two cyclists there who were biking the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route; they were kind enough to get out of their tent in the rain and help me set up.

I laid in my tent for a long time that night before sleeping. I had felt so sure about this just the previous night, but now that Peter had actually left I was having some doubts about my ability to do it alone. For now, my goal was just to get to Eureka.