Day 139 - Continental Divide Trail - Strawberry Creek to North Badger Creek

Day: 139

Date: Sunday, 22 September 2024

Start:  Strawberry Creek

Finish:  North Badger Creek 

Daily Kilometres:  37.7

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

Total Kilometres:  4049.6

Weather:  Very cold early then cool and mostly overcast.

Accommodation:  Tent

Nutrition:

  Breakfast:  Pop tarts/Muesli

  Lunch:  Protein bars/Trail mix 

  Dinner:  Rehydrated meals 

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

Highlight:  We passed the 2500 mile mark of our trek today.

Lowlight:  We woke at 5am to a tent with frozen condensation on the inside and ice on the outside.  Packing it up in the dark was miserably cold.  Then, because we had to ford a creek to continue on the trail, we crossed it in our sandals then put our boots/shoes on.  It was bitterly cold and we both had frozen feet for the first hour or so, not to mention frozen hands.  This may have been the lowlight of the whole trip!

Pictures: Click here

Map and Position: Click here for Google Map

Journal:

We woke at 5am, packed up our frozen tent and forded the adjacent stream (see above).  We were both miserably cold for the first hour or so and that encouraged fast hiking by headlamp in an effort to warm up.

For most of the morning we were passing through a burnt out forest with lots of fallen trees and other dead trees still standing like forlorn sentinels.  On either side of the Strawberry Creek valley, along which we were hiking, were stoney mountains.  The trail, which must get quite a lot of horse traffic, was cut up and very boggy, though not as bad as it might have been had the ground not been partially frozen.  We could understand why some hikers call the Bob Marshall Wilderness the Bog Marsh Wilderness.

It was a very autumnal day, cool and overcast, with much of the deciduous foliage yellow or orange.

Around noon, we crossed the low Muskrat Pass (5987’) and left the Bob Marshall Wilderness.  The Chinese Wall had been the highlight, but there were other spectacular escarpments and lovely forest in between, though it was sad to see such extensive burnt areas.

Outside the Wilderness, the trail continued to be boggy for some kilometres then became firmer underfoot but very overgrown with wirey scratchy undergrowth.  Seemed like we had to have bogs or undergrowth.

Later in the afternoon, we descended to North Badger Creek and the trail became better, passing through cool damp pine forest.

Around 6:45pm, we reached our target creek, where there was reputedly Verizon phone reception, and camped.  The reason for wanting phone reception was that, with a 40km+ day tomorrow, we will reach our last town and resupply point, East Glacier Park, and be able to have an extra day off.  That would be helpful because while in town, we will have to spend time getting to another town, St Mary, 50km away where there is a Glacier National Park Visitor Centre, to obtain our backcountry and camping permits for the last five days of our journey.  You can only get these in person on the day of, or the day before, you enter the park.

We did manage to get an additional night at our already booked motel in East Glacier Park and will make a very early start tomorrow in order to arrive at a reasonable time tomorrow evening.