Day 10: Caribou Creek to Sheep Mountain Lodge
“Smelling the Barn”
“Looks like you are off-course,” she said. I read the text message from my wife before I got out of the tent I had sent messages to Tamra on my Delorme "in-reach" at the end of each hiking day. It is an amazing tool that allows me to send text messages from anywhere in the world. I have found it to be a useful tool mostly because it keeps loved ones from worrying. She knew we were off-course because I had shown her our route on Google Earth before we left. Each in-reach message contains a link to our GPS location on a map.
We quickly came to realize the harsh reality of our mistake from the day before; Our final day just got several hours longer. By this point in the trip we were smelling-the-barn and I’m not afraid to admit that it was a rather tough pill-to-swallow as the gravity of our situation soaked into our bones. Keeping to our positive attitudes and energy, we swallowed our pride and headed back up the trail that we had come down the night before.
In my mind I had envisioned us waltzing into Sheep Mountain lodge mid afternoon. Although I’d never been there, I imagined a bar with several patrons gathered around yucking-it-up over cheeseburgers and beer. The reality of the situation turned out to be much different but I snapped out of my dream-world and realized that I’d better start paying more attention to the map and less attention to fictional cheeseburgers. “We’re not out of the woods yet,” I thought to myself.
After back-tracking to the river we discovered that, contrary to our 1950’s printed map, there was no tractor trail leading further down Caribou Creek. We scrambled up onto the ridge above the creek in search of a trail only to come up empty; We decided to work our way back along the ridge and then eventually back down to the creek; It was time to float.
Soon enough we made it to the creek, inflated our rafts, pulled on our dry-suits and set-off down stream. The creek was moving fast but it was well within our capabilities and we had no problems; It was super fun! We knew from studying the maps that there was a pinch-point a couple of miles below us and we made sure to pulled-over to scout it out.
The whole creek funneled into a slot no more than twenty feet wide. The chute was only two hundred feet long before it opened back up but it looked pretty rowdy; We portaged around it.
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| I'm having a snack overlooking "the chute". |
After putting back into Caribou creek we paddled a few more bends. I called for a “pull-out” when I couldn’t see around a blind corner. We got out of our packrafts and walked downstream to get a better look. It looked okay but I had an idea. "Let's check for the ATV trail," I said. A short walk revealed a well traveled trail that would be only 1.5 miles to our next waypoint: Squaw Creek. We could have rafted down to Squaw Creek but Art and I being a couple of old conservative dudes decided to pack-up and hike it out. This trail would lead us around the corner up the Squaw Creek valley. We would follow this trail for about 7 miles. A lone wolf with huge paws and a big brown bear had traveled down the length of this trail ahead of us; We encountered their tracks intermittently on all of the muddy sections. As the day wore on and the miles ticked off the thought crossed my mind that maybe, like Art and myself they were traveling buddies working together to complete some crazy race. "Look, there they are again," said Art.
I checked the gps on my phone (gaia app) and discovered that finally it was time to cross the valley. We could see a trail cut into the mountainside far across the valley and soon we found the connecting trail that led us there. We had to overcome a giant beaver pond that was obstructing the trail. "Hey, check it out," I said. In the middle of the trail was the business end of a kayak paddle. It turned out to be owned by a guy named Tom who was one of our competitors; We met him trail-side on day one. Art tucked it into my pack and we continued our slog through the beaver marsh and beyond.
We were tired. With eight miles to the finish we sat down next to a creek. “Hey Steve, try some of this,” Art handed me half of a big chocolate bar that he’d brought back from Patagonia.
“Wow, Thanks.” We sat there together eating great chocolate next to a stream and I couldn’t help but think of how grateful I was to be so close to completing this trip with such an amazing person as Art. Maybe it was the chocolate talking but I don’t think so.
I grabbed my water filter and reached down to fill up. I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw a cluster of a hundred or so green inch worms gathered together at the bottom of the creek. Upon further inspection I noticed another similar group a little further down the creek. "What is going on here?" I thought.
Back on day two of the trip, over coffee, I had asked Arthur a philosophical question. "Hey Artie, as the trip progresses let's see if we can identify our kindred animal spirit that would be with us all along the way."
"Hey, that sounds great," he said. I was thinking that maybe we would see caribou every day and our kindred animal spirit would be the caribou, or maybe some bird like the Arctic Tern; Terns are cool. It became apparently obvious after a couple more days on the trail that our kindred animal spirit would be none other than....the inchworm. It was perfect; We were slow and methodical and made inchworm-like progress each day. Each time we stopped one of us would have a tiny green inchworm on our sleeve or pack or boot. We made sure to be careful with them. Art would carefully relocate them to a nearby leaf of a bush or tree. At one lunch break, he had one on his hat. I watched as it made a slinky move from the edge of the hat to the top of his ear lobe. "Hey Art he just bridged to your ear," I told him.
"Great," he said as we headed down the trail. I lost track of the little guy as he wiggled over the rim of Art's ear.
So it was a little disheartening to see so many of our little buddies pooled up on the bottom of the creek. I'd like to think that they were gathering to say goodbye to us. We were close to the end of our journey and they had been with us the whole time.
We said our goodbyes to the last of the chocolate and the worms and hit the trail. The last section of our trip was not our favorite. It was on four wheeler trails that, in some sections, had been bogged-out due to extreme overuse. Wherever the trail got muddy through a swamp, there were many other trails running adjacent to them that would completely destroy the area further. We came across many of these sites on this last day and it was disconcerting to see such a blatant disregard for the wilderness destroyed in the name of “getting-there.”
Soon enough we dropped down off of the North side of Gunsight mountain and onto the decommissioned Old Glenn highway. That’s right, the last four miles of this thing were on……pavement. Needless to say we were pretty wasted at the end of what would turn out to be a 17 hour day. The unforgiving surface of the asphalt pounded into our bones as we made our way to Sheep Mountain lodge.
At 12:23 AM we stepped into the parking completing our journey of over 140 miles. We took a quick group selfie, set up our tent and crashed hard. We wouldn’t find the ziplock back with the finishers sign-in list until the next morning; It was taped to a pole next to an RV. On it were eleven finishers. We signed in as number 12 and 13 and as it turned out would be the last to finish.
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| Happy finishers. As it turned out we would get our cheeseburgers and beer the next day. I recommend the blue cheese burger at Sheep Mountain Lodge; it's especially tasty after a long hike. |
