Day: 127
Date: Tuesday, 10 September 2024
Start: Bison Blackfoot Trail Jct
Finish: Hwy 12 (but staying in Helena)
Daily Kilometres: 44.3
GPX Track: Click here for Julie’s Strava & Photos
Total Kilometres: 3724.9
Weather: Very cold early, then warm with hazy sunshine.
Accommodation: Motel
Nutrition:
Breakfast: Pop tarts/Muesli
Lunch: Snacks/Trail mix
Dinner: Cheeseburgers & fries potatoes, icecream.
Aches: Dave - the usual niggles; Julie - nothing reported.
Highlight: During the afternoon, our route took us through the historic mining village of Rimini. There were many old wooden buildings and, as we passed by, a local working in his garden gave us a brief history of the area and town. His own house dated back to 19th century.
Lowlight: The last 10km today, which involved walking along a flat sealed road after many kilometres, and a very early start, seemed to go on forever, made worse by having prominent mile markers counting down our progress to the end.
Pictures: Click here
Map and Position: Click here for Google Map
Journal:
We decided to get up at 4am to give us more time to hike the 40km+ to Highway 12, and our hitch to Helena, We were on the trail before 5am, hiking by headlamp through quiet pine forest until dawn at 6:30am.
At 7am, we had a decision to make. We already knew the CDT was closed 15km ahead for the summer because of a prescribed burn and there was a suggested alternate which we planned to take. However, we had learned during the last few days through our crowd-sourced navigation app that the alternate was no longer viable because the forest road was closed to all comers. Instead, there were now a number of suggested alternates from hikers ahead of us, some ambiguous and others confusing.
We chose a suggested alternate that claimed to be easy to follow and shorter. It turned out to be easier to follow, but was actually longer. It started with a long forest road walk, during the first part of which the temperature dropped markedly. It was freezing. The road passed near some old mines that were being environmentally cleaned up and we were passed by some early morning dump trucks. Later, we learned that the original alternate route road was closed for the same reason.
We tried to maintain a good pace through mostly pine forest, some of which had been logged, as the road climbed over the shoulder (8000’) of Old Baldy Mt. Near the crest, we met a southbound CDT thru-hiker, the first we had seen for more than a week. He was a nice guy and keen for a chat, but the encounter left us feeling sorry for him. He was finding it hard, he was lonely, and he knew he was a long way behind most other southbound hikers and unlikely to catch them.
From the crest,.which we reached around 10am, the rest of our day was spent descending or on the flat. Along the way we passed through the atmospheric old mining town of Rimini (see above), though there were now quite a few vacation cabins along the road as well.
Finally, soon after 5pm, we reached Hwy 12 and booked an Uber to come.and collect us and.take us to our booked motel in the centre of the large town of Helena, the capital of Montana, where we arrived around 6pm. Julie quickly showered and went out to buy some takeout dinner and we ate while watching the Trump-Harris debate. Perfect timing!
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