The Bob

Bob Marshall. Who was he? I have no idea. But his name is on a short list with Ansel Adams, John Muir, and Frank Church. Or should be. Or maybe its weird to make a list of awesome wilderness areas in the lower 48 named after white dudes. Anyway, the Bob is awesome.

Went over Pyramid Pass, and down Youngs Creek. The first two crossings were tough, the third was bad. Got three quarters of the way and the rest was deeper. Too late, I'll just hop/swim the rest, while being swept downstream a bit. That's worked out OK so far, except you get worried real quick about whether a log on the other side is a sweeper (bad) or something you want to grab onto (good). It was fine, except I was freezing. So I danced around cussing and screaming for a bit, then walked on. 

Twenty minutes later, I heard some pounding, and turned in time to see, thirty yards away, a cow elk running for her life from a wolf, who was already running equal to her midside. Another wolf came by ten seconds later. I think the elk was toast. 

I made it to my last planned crossing of Youngs Creek, which by this point is the South Fork of the Flathead. Um, no thanks, I'll stick to bridges, which means I have to stay on this side and get to Big Prairie. To make up for that disappointment, I found the biggest elk antler I've ever found. Sorry George, only part of it is making it home to you--it was 40+ pounds.

The next day I realized I couldn't even get to Big Prairie bridge because another feeder (Gordon Creek) was too big. Dammit.

So I backtracked to old, not well maintained but followable trail way the hell up over Gordon Peak, then there was no trail but I climbed Kid Peak anyway and scrambled like mad off the back side right past a bear den anyway. I found lower trail the next day but didn't want to stay on it so I found a hillside that I thought would go all the way back down to Gordon and, if I was lucky, be recently burnt all the way (one year of undergrowth while hopping over blowdowns is way, way, way better than ten years). I was lucky. 

When I got to Gordon Creek, it was still too big to cross, except I lucked out and found a log-jam/beaver-dam. It was wide as hell and required guessing which logs are just floating and which are solid, with a few waste deep sections, but they were brief, so I made it. Uneventful trail from there to Big Prairie.

BP is heaven. Get yourself there sometime. The FS trail crew and the MCC kids were quality folks.

I went through White River Park and up White River Pass the next day. I should have gone up Haystack peak, traversed *on top* of the Chinese Wall north and then headed south under the wall and headed out via Benchmark, but once I was on White River Pass that loop didn't make sense anymore, so I glissaded down and did bunch of off trail traversing just under the wall until I hit the CDT, which was the basic goal, since I missed the wall in '07 because of fire.

The next day, I got to where I could see the north end of the wall, so I'd seen the whole thing, then dropped down Moose Creek and the North Fork of the Sun River to Gibson Reservoir. It ended with a long and kinda boring but pretty walk around the reservoir. 

I hitched into Augusta, got breakfast, and hitched to East Glacier. Headed to Waterton after some Post Office errands tomorrow!