Day 096 - Continental Divide Trail - South Two Ocean Creek to Snake River Backcountry Campsite

Day: 096

Date: Saturday, 10 August 2024

Start:  South Two Ocean Creek

Finish:  Snake River Backcountry Campsite

Daily Kilometres:  36.2

GPX Track:  Click here for Julie’s Strava & Photos

Total Kilometres:  2810.0

Weather:  Very cold early then mild and overcast with a thunderstorm at noon and another mid-afternoon.  Mostly sunny in the evening.

Accommodation:  Tent

Nutrition:

  Breakfast:  Pop tarts/Muesli

  Lunch:  Snacks/Trail mix

  Dinner:  Rehydrated meals

Aches:  Dave - the usual niggles; Julie - nothing reported.

Highlight:  Reaching the famous Yellowstone National Park which seemed impossibly far away when we left the Mexican border just over three months ago.

Lowlight:  Yellowstone gave us a welcoming thunderstorm when we arrived around noon.  The temperature plummeted, icy rain began to fall and the wind picked up.  Our mood was not helped by the need to ford freezing rivers and creeks ensuring we had cold wet feet, or forcing our way through sopping wet vegetation and dense willow thickets.  As we hiked across the open Snake River valley floor, lightning flashed and thunder boomed for nearly an hour to accompany the cold.  Julie was not happy!

Pictures: Click here

Map and Position: Click here for Google Map

Journal:

We were woken by a thunderstorm in the small hours accompanied by steady rain but, fortunately, it had gone by the time we got up.  After packing up a slightly wet tent we were hiking by 6:15am.

Our first few kilometres, on an overcast and cold morning, involved climbing up to, and then hiking across, the Two Oceans Plateau at just over 10000’.  Once we warmed up, it was pleasant hiking with hazy views to distant mountains from the treeless plateau.

Then began a long descent to the Snake River and, after fording it a couple of times, we crossed from the Teton Wilderness into Yellowstone National Park.  About the same time, an unpleasant thunderstorm arrived (see above).  We continued to follow the meandering Snake River downstream for the rest of the day, crossing it twice more along with numerous tributaries.

Further downstream it passed through a ravine and the trail climbed high on the overlooking hillside from where we could hear and see the river roaring below.

After the noon thunderstorm, the weather warmed up in the early afternoon but then it cooled again as we caught the edge of another thunderstorm and some more rain.

For the last part of the day the river valley flattened out again, the weather calmed, and the hiking became easier.

We have to stay in booked, and paid for, campsites in the Yellowstone backcountry.  As we walked along the track that led to our booked Snake River Campsite, we spotted a nice place to camp in a copse of pine trees and stopped around 7:15pm.  We are not, strictly speaking, at the campsite where we are supposed to be, but a southbound CDT hiker we met yesterday said he had not seen a ranger at any campsite nor had his permit checked, so we think we'll be OK.

We saw more than twenty southbound CDT thru-hikers today, and nobody else.  Southbound hikers generally start between mid-June and mid-July as the snow melts in Glacier National Park on the Canadian border, so the hiker bubble will be passing by us for the next few weeks.  They will only be one-third of the way into their journey while we are two-thirds through ours.