Sambo and Brandi at the North Fork Cabin
Our son Sid and I had been trying to work out a combination pack trip and hike for quite a while, but our schedules never seemed to line up. This year he signed up to run The Rut, a marathon held in Big Sky with 11,000 feet of vertical gain. So he's been training every day, doing a lot of running up to peaks and high lakes. We decided it would be cool to meet at Half-Moon Park on the east side of Scapegoat Mountain. The plan was for him to run up from the Deerborn River trailhead; I would pack in from the North Fork of the Blackfoot and bring all our gear and food. Then we would spend a day up on top of Scapegoat exploring around, and the next day I would take down camp and ride out while he either ran out with me or ran back to his truck another way.
I had a new-to-me pack mule, Brandi, a retired Forest Service mule for some reason I agreed to take on from a friend. I spent the two weeks before the trip trying to get her into shape, taking short half-day trips around home with the panniers loaded with cinder blocks. Neither Brandi nor Sambo, my saddle horse, had shoes on, but Sambo has gone without shoes quite a bit and the trails aren't all hard so I figured they would be ok.
We have had a lot of blowdown this year, and I was concerned the trails might not be completely cut out. I always carry a saw but if there is a lot of blowdown I might not be able to make it to camp to meet Sid. I also didn't want to push the horses too hard, so decided to take two days to get to camp on the east side of Scapegoat. The plan was to pack in to somewhere near Carmichael Cabin on day one, then go up and over a pass around the south end of Scapegoat to camp on the east side.
I have a Garmin InReach Mini I got a few years ago with which I can send canned messages to Dona so she knows I'm ok. I added Sid to the contact list. There are basically three messages I can send:
The messages include the GPS coordinates and a link to a map showing the location. I told Sid if he got a message saying "I'm stopping my trip here," it meant I couldn't make it to camp and we should abort the trip so he wouldn't run all that way and end up in the middle of nowhere with no food, and no sleeping bag. It wouldn't be the end of the world, but it would make for an uncomfortable night feeding sticks into the fire.
We checked trail information and all we could learn was that the trail up the Deerborn where Sid would be running and the trail I would be riding to Carmichael Cabin were open, but everything else was listed as condition unknown.
I drove Sambo and Brandi to the trailhead, packed up, and headed out about 09:45. It was hot but we were in the shade much of the way; the horses got a drink at a side-stream a short ways before we arrived at the North Fork cabin, where I met two separate hikers who looked like they were there just for the day.
After a brief rest, we pushed up the hill behind the cabin and on past where the East Fork comes in. We stopped and I let them graze a bit while I ate some lunch.
Then we headed on up towards Carmichael Cabin. It's not spectacular country, but it is pretty. We've had a pretty wet spring, the wettest in years, and the river and all the side-streams were still flowing reasonably well.
We came to where the Mt. Evans Trail takes off. It's an open area with a nice view but not much good soil and consequently not much grass for stock.
The animals got a good drink when we crossed the river, now just a small stream, before arriving at Carmichael Cabin.
My plan was to continue on for about a mile to a place I had marked long ago on my map as a possible campsite. However, I didn't get 100 yards past the cabin when I came to the first downed tree across the trail, and could see more past that. However, they were relatively small trees and the area was flat and semi-open, so we could work our way over or around them. But it seemed like there was an endless stream of them, and then I came across a largish one chest high across the trail that wasn't easy to get around. I decided I was going to have to go back to the cabin and camp near there. I found my camp spot, unloaded, and set up a picket line for Sambo and Brandi.
I turned on the InReach and waited for it to get a GPS fix, which takes forever (5 minutes?), and then sent the "I'm here, all is ok" message so Dona and Sid would know I'd made it to camp near Carmichael Cabin. I didn't send the abort message because I was hoping the trail wasn't as bad as it looked.
Then I took my saw and gloves and headed back up the trail to cut out some of the logs and check out what lay beyond.
It took me about half an hour to cut out the chest-high log across the trail, partly because it was damp and my saw kept binding. I cut off the branches in the area of the trail which were partially supporting it, so if it dropped it would be as low as possible. I only had to cut it in one spot and then in dropped down to the trail and a horse could step over it.
But it wasn't too far up the trail that I came to a show-stopper, at least for me. My saw is only about 24" long, and this tree was going to take a while to cut through; considerably longer than the previous one. And I could see more trees to cut out already up ahead where the trail crossed the creek. They weren't large, but each one would take time. I still had several miles of trail through timber, much of it switchbacks on a steep slope, to get to the pass at the south end of Scapegoat. While it wasn't an absolute, it seemed pretty likely I wasn't going to be able to cut the necessary trees out and make it to our planned camp spot by tomorrow evening. So I turned on the Garmin again and sent the abort message.
I was pretty tired, so I turned around and headed back to set up camp for the night. I fed the horses some grain and then took them out to graze for an hour or so.
The weather was nice and the mosquitoes weren't bad so I didn't bother to set up the tent. I just spread out a ground cloth and put out my sleeping pad and with a saddle blanket down by my feet. Since the weather was hot (in the 90's) I had only brought a light-weight flannel sleeping blanket we had used when we were in Namibia, so I spread that out.
I wasn't particularly hungry. The food I had brought for dinners was freeze-dried, and they only come in "Two-Person" servings, and I didn't feel like eating that much. I decided to try to split one.
I opened the pouch and poured half of it into my plastic bowl, then resealed the other half for use another day. Then I poured hald the amount of boiling water into the bowl, and wrapped the whole thing in my "Crispy Critter" tarp cutout I carry to keep the stove from starting a fire on the ground or melting through a plastic picnic table (Lesson learned the hard way...). In the photo below, the wrapped dinner is on the left-hand log just to the right of the fire.
My Namibia sleeping blanket turned out not to be warm enough; I ended up borrowing Sid's sleeping bag halfway through the night.
The next morning I packed up and headed back. I met Sid running up the trail with his dog Copper about two miles from the trailhead.
Since I had supplies for several days, I had considered staying and working on the trail. But I wasn't sure what Sid would do if I didn't show up after I sent the aborting trip message. In retrospect, maybe he would have run all the way up to where I was camped, and we could have worked on the trail together. So next time maybe we need more than one message pre-arranged.