After a week to resupply and rest in Portland, I made the 12hr drive to Bozeman to see my brother and his family. Many of you will recall that my brother and nephew hiked in an afternoon with me in Yellowstone on the CDT in 2013. Yes, that was the infamous bear spray incident! We kept him away from it on this trip…my older nephew was gone for a basketball tournament, so it was the four of us and we had a great time over the weekend. One day was spent river rafting the Gallatin River with my brother.
It was a great streach that included many rapids and one section that was class IV. It is called house rock because of this huge boulder that is in the center of the rapids and makes for a good challenge to make it around safely. Here is a video of that section, which was the crux of the trip. If you can’t see the video, you may have to view it on a desktop. My brother totally nailed it!
The next day we went fly fishing on the Yellowstone River and caught about 20 fish. I managed to catch four. Good times!
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| Showing off my Rainbow Fish and Brown Trout. |
Also, while in Bozeman, I met up with my hiking partner for the rest of the summer, Elizabeth aka “E.” E and her boyfriend had a wedding and friends to visit not far from Bozeman, so it works out perfectly that her boyfriend will be able to help out out with the shuttle for our section of the CDT that we will start tomorrow. I met E on the CDT in 2013 when we both thru hiked. We didn’t overlap much, but the brief time we did, we really enjoyed it and wished our hikes could have overlapped more. E was planning for her summer hike when she came across my plans for the GDT. She contacted me and we decided to go ahead and start together and hopefully stick together for the whole hike. We’re both looking forward to hiking together and having someone around up in grizzly country! I’ll talk more about E as we hike together. She doesn’t keep a blog and this will pretty much be the first time her family can follow along as she does a long hike. E has completed the triple crown and more and is just as excited as I am about the grandness of the GDT!
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| My hiking partner for the rest of the summer, “E”! |
We will do a 93mi warm up on the CDT before we head up to Canada for the GDT. We will hike a section that was closed due to fire when we came through in 2013. The section is in the Bob Marshall Wilderness and includes one of the highlights of the CDT in Montana, the Chinese Wall. The journey begins tomorrow…er, later today…it’s now 1:30am and I am just trying to get at least one post up before I head to bed. I swear I’ll never learn! Here’s the action at 9:30pm tonight as I got my brother to tape up resupply boxes…yeah, I don’t know when I’ll ever learn…This happens everytime! I’m such a procrastinator…
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| Last minute taping up of resupplies…putting my brother to work! |
