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Published: July 12th 2006
Two Mathematicians and a 10 year old Dog Go For A Very Long Walk...
...or at least that's how it started. It sounded like an innocent and splendid plan. A plan to hike the entire length of the
Bridger Ridge Run hosted yearly in August by the local Bozeman Running Club,
The Wind Drinkers. This is a 19.65 (the short way) or 20.55 (the long way) race across the knifes edge of the
Bridger Mountain Range and traverses roughly 3 miles of ups and down along the ridge. This ridge is, as stated before, a barren knifes edge with hardly a tree in sight as high up as 9600 feet (Sacajawea Peak) to as low as, well, Bozeman (4800 feet). It runs along the top of 6 of the 8 peaks of the ridge, across steeply angled talus and shale ridden slippery slopes of doom and thru two beautiful alpine meadows. The views are amazing, the trials titillating, and the weather crazy and sometimes unpredictable (
2005's August run was done in the snow). What convinced The Beagle/German Shepherd Mix Gauss, Shane, and Myself to do this incredible journey in one day? Well the weather was fairly pleasant that day...or so we thought.
A Little Background on the Dog
Before anyone calls
PETA on
me let me field some questions from the audience to help clarify things.
How old is this dog?
10 years old, yep that is roughly equivalent to a 70 year old man doing this hike.
ARE YOU INSANE?
Nope, his owner is an avid outdoors hiker and overall hiking monster and takes the old Gausser on long crazy hikes all the time. Gauss is in better shape than most human beings his age (not 10, but the 70 year olds) or my age (mid twenties).
Beagle/German Shepherd mix, Isn't that a weird looking dog?
Yeah a little, but we love him, any pet named after the "
Prince of Mathematics" is OK in my book. Plus he's fuzzy, good tempered and as low maintainence as a cat.
The start of the journey
The night before this journey I (and come to find out Shane as well) thought about going to bed around 8pm to get up early for our 5am meet time at my house and I (and Shane as it turns out) continued to think about going to bed at 8pm until we did go to bed around 11:30pm. Ahhh the fickles and indecisiveness of youth. So we
Hardscrabble Peak
Shane and Gauss on their way to mount Hardscrabble.meet up at 8am with a gallon of water, two lunches, and extra clothing each and a lot of ambition and pride (both of which were lost later that day). It wasn't until around 6:30am that we reached the trail head that headed up from Fairy Lake (a very beautiful mountain lake that is one of the BEST camping spots in the Gallatin Valley) and were on our way. Full of youthful energy we decided to take a short detour from our intended plan of just hiking the whole Ridge Run Trail, but to also grab Hardscrabble Peak while we were up there, "just an extra mile, nothing too drastic" we thought and sure enough, it wasn't too bad being that fresh and the view of the whole ridge was spectacular and gave us a good idea of what the rest of the hike was going to be like (long). At least the weather was nice and there wasn't a cloud in the sky, the weather was cool and not too hot, but yet it was still early in the morning. So we grab a souvenir rock (Shane's idea to grab a little something from each peak we climb) from
Sacajawea Peak
Highest Peak on the Ridge at 9600 feet. Hardscrabble, and make our way over to Sacajawea Peak and start looking for more souvenirs What we found was a strange small unknown white substance/mineral thingy. We really aren't sure what it is, but I tasted it and it is not salt, and kind of squishy in the teeth...I hope I don't regret doing that later on in life or that it wasn't dehydrated mountain goat excrement.
Now this trail is not well marked and is sometimes not even existent (luckily it's on a ridge and that doesn't disappear often, well, at least when I'm looking at it, it doesn't move). Luckily Shane had read about the trail taking a right at certain Cairn's and looking for a certain turn off so as to stay on the ridge and not descend into the valley via another trail. With his guidance we made it over to Ross Pass took a little break to soak in the beauty of this breathtaking mountain pass, picked up a souvenir (six spent 9mm Luger bullet casings. Don't ask -we didn't, we just found them) and started up the 1000 foot ascent up Bridger Peak (1000 feet in a half a mile, it isn't much
of a trail as much as it is a 55 degree scrabble). At the top exhausted and sweating we had our first lunch, grabbed a souvenir rock (not much else up there), slathered on some sunscreen, watered the dog and jaunted onwards towards Bridger Bowl (the local Ski Area).
God's Angry Eye is Burning a Hole in My Head
Or at least that is what it felt like by the time we made it to Bridger Bowl. We had been hiking for five hours and there was no shade and the noon day sun was beating down hard. I'm sweating like a Frenchman and drinking water furiously to fuel up, some how gauss and Shane seem impervious to the evil eye of Helios high above us. Bridger Bowl is very strange in the summer, there are strange man made boxes on stilts with shovels and other strange equipment that make sense in the winter, but not at all in mid July. The chair lifts come to the top and look almost desolate and weird in the summer sun by the lift cabin and shed. There were many opportunities to pick up strange souvenirs from this mountain, but we ended
up settling on a 18 inch piece of rebar lying on the side of the trail. As we made our way in the noon day sun over the exposed ridge, baking like insects under a magnifying glass, tired from hiking for six hours I realize that I'm running low on water in my camel back and Gauss is starting to tire out. Man oh Man what a pickle, we are past the half way point and there is no easy way off the ridge, but to continue the rest of the 10 miles or so to the car parked at the M on the other side of the mountain. Luckily, we ran into a huge pile of snow on our way to Saddle Peak (the third highest peak in the range) and started to dissect it and fill up our water containers with snow. There is a little known fact about camel backs and snow, they form a very nice symbiotic relationship in the summer. The hot sweaty back heats the camel back which melts the snow as it cools off ones hot sweaty back, it's beautiful and what do you get? That's right, you get water and life is
Indian Paintbrush
Perhaps the coolest looking flower around. beautiful and world peace is obtained! After the quick raping and pillaging of the snow pile, we continued on like the mountain Nomads we dreamt we were and started the vicious and evil ascent up Saddle Peak. The reason I say it was vicious and evil is not that it was an exceedingly tough hike up, but it IS an exceedingly tough hike up when you've been hiking for 6.5 hours! At the top the sun continued to sizzle on our little heads no matter how much sun screen was applied it felt like it wasn't enough, the salt had been crystallizing on my forehead and every time I lathered on sunscreen it felt like rubbing cream on sandpaper, a very strange and weird situation. Though tired we didn't forget our need for souvenirs and tough it was tempting to take the Dead Animal Antlers on the top, I found out that it was attached to a Tibetan Prayer String and that the Karma of messing with that String would probably result in my Sunscreen acting like butter and roasting my flesh in preparation of a tasty treat for the two hawks that were gliding around the summit of Saddle
Bridger Peak
This is as we are entering Ross Pass. Peak. So instead we took yet another rock not out of failure to search, but more out of the apathetic tradition following that happens sometimes when one gets set in their ways. Hiking can be like this as well sometimes, when you are tired and you have no other way to go but onward, you move out of tradition, it is what your feet have been doing for miles and even though you are tired and not caring at the moment you do it because it's what you do, you move one foot in front of the other. If I may dare abstract this to yet another deeper metaphor, sometimes life is like that, you get stuck in a rut that you have been doing and you may no longer like or think or have any feeling for what you are doing, but you do it because it is what you do, it's what you know, it's the way it's always been and the way it will always be, this is a dangerous mind set if not questioned, but sometimes a hard one to even notice that it exists.
Stumbling off the Ridge and other pit falls
After stumbling,
Ross Pass
What a sweet little piece of Alpine Meadow Pie! sliding and sometimes even walking off the Saddle Peak we approached yet another unnamed peak, a peak that we would end up naming "Fuck Over Mountain". The sun, still shining and beating down in it's never ending bombardment of solar particles and radiation backing us like a batch of toll house cookies has tired us out. Gauss is very tired and is falling behind, we take long half hour breaks in the shade for him and make sure he is well fed and watered, but still he is tired of walking and sitting in the sun and quite frankly so are we humans. When we hit Fuck Over Mountain it appears the trail could either go downward around the ridge and back up, or continue to go up over the ridge. Some reason Shane and I thought it went down, it could have been the heat, the sweat, the tiredness, it could have been many things, but we chose the wrong direction and ended up having to scale and hop over the scrabble and loose rocks of the mountain (a very scary thing to do when one is tired and poor Gauss had to pretend to be a Mountain Goat
The Ascent to Saddle
The first peak of Saddle Peak. for fifteen minutes) Once we got back on the trial exhausted from our climb over steep loose rocks, we took a break under the shade of a lone five foot spruce tree and gave Gauss more water and drank some ourselves. After the rest we got up and continued our trek towards our final peak, Mount Baldy, and Shane informed me that this wasn't the first time the unnamed mountain had given him troubles, that it happened the last time he hiked it. Half way thru his telling of the last time the nameless mountain led him astray, a look of realization came over his face and he asked if I had picked up Gauss's water dish. I hadn't and the Nameless mountain took Gauss's water bowl as a trophy and earned itself the name of Fuck Over Mountain.
The last six miles of the ridge were extremely difficult for a couple of reasons:
* We had been hiking for almost 11 hours at this point.
* Gauss had managed to tear one of his paws and was having a hard time walking up or down hills.
* We were running low on water again.
* The trail
descends from Mount Baldy to the M roughly 3000 feet non-stop.
* Fuck Over Mountain had somehow also stolen our ambition and our pride.
By the time we reached Mount Baldy our time was already 12 hours of hiking and we ended up wrapping Gauss's injured paw in mole skin and bandages (always bring a first aid kit suckahs!) and we took our time going down to the M. Our souvenir from Mount Baldy was a lone flower, again the tradition was carried out as a rote action, not as a ambition filled quest that it had started as. By the time we made it down to the M (thanks to some nice hippie who let us drink some of his water) our legs were like to large jello molds quivering to the car to collapse in a catatonic state of immobility the ridge had kicked our ass, but we had made it, a whole total 21.55 miles of hiking thru some beautiful and rugged desolate country.
The Aftermath
Gauss and I recouped all day Sunday, I gave Gauss massages for his sore muscles and he has fully recuperated two days later, he's a trooper. I'm sore,
Mount Baldy
The Grassy Gnoll! but that's to be expected. I find it amazing and compelling that there are hundreds of people who "run" this ridge each August, it seems masochistic, but there is strange pleasure in pushing the body to it's emotional, mental, and physical limits and this ridge does just that. The runner's who run this find themselves finishing exhausted, almost always bloody, but strangely euphoric. Oh and in case you were running the best time that the 19.55 mile Ridge has ever been run is by Scott Creel with a time of 3 hours and 10 minutes a truly phenomenal feat.
The Morals of this Hike:
- If you ever plan on doing this hike it is imperative that you go with a lot of water, I personally probably needed two and a half gallons for this sunny hot and evil day.
- Don't bring a ten year old dog, no matter how tough he/she is.
- Always bring a first aid kit.
- Pee on FO Mountain if you ever get the chance.
- Rebar is not a very good souvenir from a Mountain.
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Tot: 0.22s; Tpl: 0.015s; cc: 14; qc: 88; dbt: 0.079s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.3mb
Terry C
non-member comment
Well Done! One Clarification
Wonderful narrative. It reminded me of my trip in October of 2006, when it was decidedly cooler that your hike in July. It was actually my 3rd attempt to hike the ridge. The tradeoff was that I nearly got blown off the ridge a few times in 40-MPH gusts. You were wise to get good directions in advance because there are 4 particular places where it is almost "natural" to make the wrong trail decision. So, for those attempting this trail for the first time, speak to someone who has hiked it before because otherwise, it will take you as many as 3 attempts (as it did me) to hike the ridge because you too can get hopelessly off course. Also, I believe (I could be worng, it's happened before) that the mountain above Ross Pass (and above Bridger Bowl) is not actually Bridger Peak. I believe the FOM Peak you refer to is actually called Bridger Peak. And, the decision you made to go left (on the most obvious path) is one of the 4 places I mentioned previously. It is actually a game trail that peters out. Another word of caution about bringing a dog. If your dog enjoys chasing wildlife, he/she may try to run after the mountain goats on the ridge. This could be a big mistake for your dog, since mountain goats will lead your dog over the gnarliest terrain you'd ever imagine. So, unless Fido is under voice control, leave him at home. Carrying enough water for yourself and for Fido (not water on the route at all) is almost impossible. Anyway, great writing, and a great adventure. Congrats!!!! Terry C