cyberhobo

I’m grateful that the rain has stopped by morning, but it’s cold, and putting on my wet clothes is a torture. We hike briskly to our last Buffalo River crossing, the North Fork. This time we assess it carefully before wading in. It’s just a little easier than the South Fork, and I assist Ann…

We get up very early to make it through the Togwotee Pass construction with enough time left to hike 20 miles. It goes smoothly, and we’re hiking around Brooks Lake by 8 am. We haven’t hiked an hour when we see two bears retreating up the valley. The trail here is most heavily used by…

Resting in Jackson is great, but my stomach is not cooperating fully. I should be eating constantly and indiscriminately to put some weight back on, but everything I eat gives me heartburn, and I just can’t consume the volumes I need to. Still, I slowly make my way through a couple of good restaurant meals…

A little more cross country gets us onto an old trail that leads us to the road to Togwotee Pass. Lest we have a day of easy hiking, we attempt to find an alternate trail to Brooks Lake and spend half the route bushwhacking to a high, spectacular gap near Sublette Mountain. From there we…

The hiking feels uncharted today, despite our complete dependence on maps. We follow blazed snowmobile trails along the divide, then a long trail almost impossible to walk on due to thousands of elk footprints dried in the dirt. A little road provides some relief, then it’s back to elk trail. Finally we walk an old…

Pete and I set off on this segment on our own, curious what the country will be like north of the Wind Rivers. The trails definitely see much less use, and we get off course once when I don’t pay close enough attention. The best section is an alternate we take at the end of…

It’s my 37th birthday! I take a rest day with the family, eating cakes and drinking beer. This might help prevent a full recovery of my digestive systems, despite the rest day, but I enjoy it!

Today the only pressure is to not be too late to the trailhead, where my Dad and Sarah are supposed to join Bob and Carol to greet us. The early day goes slowly as we have to pick our way slowly down some frozen snowfields, but once we’re on dirt trail again the hiking is…

The question of the day is whether there will be too much snow on the far side of Shannon Pass to make it over and down the other side. If so, we’ll have at least three extra miles of rough terrain to cover to circumvent it, and probably more the way the miles have been…

We hike for miles through the lake-dotted, glacially sculpted plateau of the western Wind River range. Long miles – each one seems to take us nearly an hour. Lots of small climbs and descents. It’s getting late by the time we reach North Fork Lake, but we press on toward Hat Pass. It’s 8 pm…