On the stolen land of the Blackfeet, Ktunaxa, Cayuse, Umatilla, and Walla Walla peoples.

This post is about my 2022 thru attempt. I’m not currently thru-hiking and will not be in the 2024 season. I’ll announce concrete plans when I have them.

Getting to the Border

The following morning, I caught a ride to the permit station in Two Medicine, and managed to get a permit for the same day. It was supposed to include two ten-mile days with a campsite at Elizabeth Lake Foot. The first problem I ran into was that the permit was set up for me to start at the Canadian border, some 80 trail miles away and even further on road. I didn’t have a ride lined up, and because the border crossing the road leads to is closed, hitching wasn’t a viable option. I asked if the ranger knew of any shuttle services, knowing that I would have to first find my way back to somewhere with cell service to call them. She pointed to a guy standing not too far away and told me that he drives shuttles.

Craig Falcon is a shuttle driver within GNP and a member of the Blackfeet Nation. He told me he would undercut the price of any other shuttle driver in the area, and told me that he provides a history lesson along with the drive. He made good on that offer.

I’m not going to go into great detail here about the US’s atrocities against the Blackfeet people here, but I am going to provide resources for you to learn more at the bottom of this post. I do not have words, just seething rage for my ancestors and our government. For the purposes of this post, know that it was torture followed by genocide followed by more torture.

I carried a few things Craig told me with me into the mountains. First, the Blackfeet people consider the mountains in Glacier National Park to be where the world began. They have lived on this land for thousands of years. They are from here. They have a connection to the land that I cannot begin to fathom. Second, when the US outlawed Blackfeet religious practices, they took their rituals into the mountains where the US police and military couldn’t follow. Their religion, their rituals, their faith and their practices, their language, all of it is intact in spite of everything we have thrown at them. They are survivors. It was an honor to get to walk in those mountains, but I am still conflicted about our ability to do so, because it is not on the Blackfeet Nation’s terms.

With the history lesson in hand, he dropped me off at the border and I started walking south.

Into the Valley

My first day was almost exclusively downhill or flat. The low desert in New Mexico was beautiful in an unassuming way. I love the desert, it’s breathtaking and unexpectedly full of life, but the mountains in Glacier NP hold a different kind of beauty. It’s the kind of beauty that commands attention, that stopped me in my tracks, that caught my breath. I could not take my eyes off of them. I stood alone in a valley after hiking down just spinning in slow circles completely surrounded by mountains. There wasn’t another person in eyesight in any direction and maybe it should have felt lonely, but it just felt free. I bailed out of Montana because I wasn’t in the right headspace, but in this moment and a few others, I was all in. I could not feel or see or think of anything other than those mountains, other than that beauty.

And then, there were the mosquitoes. They got progressively worse as I descended into the valley and were so bad at the campsite at Lake Elizabeth Foot that I had to attempt eat in full rain gear with my head net on and eventually gave up on dinner. I had deet with me and got desperate enough to try it, but it did nothing. It was also then that I realized some of my food from my resupply packages had gone bad. I still had enough food to comfortably finish the section, but the bad food was occupying my cold soak container, which was unfortunate. I could have dumped it into a Ziploc, but I was worried about the possibility of leaks and opted to roll with beef jerky, granola, and peanut butter/Nutella for the next day.

There is something incredibly satisfying about watching a swarm of mosquitoes try and fail to eat you through the mesh of a tent.

In the above gallery, you’ll notice one zoomed in picture (it’s the exact same pic as the one with the lake next to it). Those black bird looking things aren’t birds, they’re mosquitoes. Yep, phone cameras are that good now. I was surprised, too.

Red Gap Pass

The following day I woke up before the mosquitoes and hiked out. It was my first big mountain pass, and the climb was well graded but difficult for me at my present endurance level. I realized about a mile in that I definitely didn’t have enough water to get to the next marked water source and was crossing my fingers I would find an unmarked source ahead of time. I’d been lulled into complacency by the last few days of hiking (which had involved approximately 1001 unmarked sources), but for the next mile or so there were none. I was furious with myself. I’d been so careful in the desert, but two days in Montana and I’d let my guard down. At several points I could hear water, but I couldn’t see any and I didn’t want to risk heading too far off trail for water that might be inaccessible from where I was currently at. In the end, patience prevailed, and I found an unmarked source well before the next marked one.

There was a second problem, one I’d discovered at my campsite the night before. The ranger at the permit office had told me that it was two ten-ish mile days. I’d done the math and realized, already neck deep in the hike, that it was actually a 17-mile second day, not even counting the hike into the campsite, which added a few extra miles. And I hear you. I did over 22 with giardia in the desert not that long ago. The problem was that a) the giardia and the time between hikes had caused me to lose my trail legs and b) there were two passes with a combined total of more than 3,500ft in elevation gain in those 17 miles. It took me until noon to make it the 3ish miles to the top of Red Gap, which encompassed about 2,000ft of the total elevation gain for the day. It was becoming apparent that 17 miles wasn’t going to happen without night hiking, and solo night hiking in the area with the most grizzly bears per square mile in the lower 48 was not a viable back-up plan. Also, I don’t blame the permit ranger for this. She should have known, and that’s on her, it was my responsibility to double check because I was the one who had to actually hike it. Lesson learned. Regardless, I was in it, and I was the one who was going to have to figure it out. I noticed a side trail marked on my map. It led directly onto a well-traveled road where I could hitch to the campsite. The only problem was that the side trail was 0.9 miles long and had 1,200ft of elevation loss, which is steep. It’s steep with a solid oof at the end. It’s basically straight down. I didn’t like the looks of it, but I logged it in the back of my mind as a bailout.

Red Gap Pass was incredible. It was (shocker) full of red rocks. I ate a snack up there with some other hikers I ran into and we exchanged stories of how we got there. There were mountain goats. I could see the whole Earth from there. Looking down from the top, I could see the edge of the lake where I’d camped before, and had a chance to see what I had done that morning. It’s pretty rare that you get that clear of a representation of how far you’ve come on trail. It was stunning.

We began our descent when the wind picked up, a group of six. There was still frozen snow, and it slowed me down. It was my first time having to backpack on it. My knees and ankles are also not known for their steadiness, so it was a little bit daunting. At one point, I stopped because I saw a streak downward in the snow that could only have been made by someone sliding down, and saw the other five hikers at the bottom. “Did you glissade?” I asked, and they affirmed.

Glissading is butt sliding down snow as a means of getting down a mountain. It is sledding sans sled. It was epic. Somewhere out there is a photo of me holding up my trekking poles and sliding down with the wild smile only five-year-olds get on my face, if I ever find it anywhere I will post it. I knocked it off the backpacking bucket list, and I’ll be doing it again in a heartbeat at every reasonable opportunity. We got through the snowy section and I kept hiking, but it was one of those days where I needed breaks frequently to adjust my pack, fix an ankle brace, etc. My pack was heavier than was ideal, and it was becoming very apparent that I was not going to pull off 17 miles. It was a problem, but the only thing I could do about it was to keep walking.

The views continued to be stunning. I listened to music for a while and then switched to an audiobook. I was frustrated by the situation and afraid of grizzlies, and the mosquitoes were fierce after I got below the snow line after Red Gap. It was too hot to comfortably wear rain gear to combat them, and they drove me insane. I was frustrated, exhausted, and on edge. I ended up on a section of trail that was relatively flat and just below the snow line, and there were so. Many. Mosquitoes. Around a corner, I found bear prints and a large bit of bear scat. I’m not super good at identifying prints, but they were larger than my foot. I was frustrated and done, and over the ten miles I’d thought I was going to do that day. I hit a point where I was so frustrated by the mosquitoes and my pace that I was crying furiously while walking, before coming around a bend and running into two day hikers who’d gone pack-less up the side trail. I nodded awkwardly to them and kept crying and walking because sometimes that’s just the vibe. I came up to the short bailout trail, and I took it.

It was so steep that I had to sit down and treat it like a slide several times, but I made it down the trail without hurting myself. I ended up catching a ride quickly along the road from a family headed to the lodge at Many Glacier. They dropped me off at the campground and I walked to the site for backpackers, finding the people I’d met at Red Gap and a few others from Looking Glass.

Sources for Blackfeet History

When I was researching to provide sources for this post, I looked first for sources written by members of the Blackfeet Nation. The US Blackfeet Nation website does not have descriptions of their history, and I’ve struggled to find other reputable sources. Here are three websites to get you started, and I’ll update if I can find more good sources with indigenous authors. I included one that’s likely by a not indigenous author (everyculture.com) because it’s thorough and seems to be corroborated by what I was told by the Blackfeet people I spoke with, and because it’s in a timeline form that could help with context.

https://blog.nativehope.org/wandering-warriors-the-history-of-the-blackfeet-tribe
https://blackfootconfederacy.ca/about/
https://www.everyculture.com/multi/A-Br/Blackfoot.html