SUMMARY:  It rained all night, but we were fine in our tent. It didn’t stay fine, though. Just after we finished eating breakfast (6:15am) the rain suddenly changed to big globs of heavy, wet snow. Very quickly it began piling up on everything, including our tent, and the trail. “Yikes! We’d better pack up and get going fast!” We did our best, but the snow was coming down so hard that we finally just rolled up the tent and lashed it to the top of Fixit’s pack. Then, just as I started walking the few steps over to the trail, wham! I was suddenly overwhelmed with horrendous nausea and “lost my breakfast”.

Still feeling wobbly, I headed up the trail anyway and was hit with problems at the “other end”. What’s wrong with me? I was fine 5 minutes ago! Then I thought, wait, maybe this is the only way God could get my attention. It’s 10 1/2 tough miles to Roger’s Pass, and only 3 miles back to Flesher Pass. I told Fixit, and he’d started thinking the same thing. “I don’t want to do a re-enactment of the Donner Party,” he said. So back we went, and with some amazing help from God,  we are now in Lincoln, and will need to wait a day for the weather to clear.

DETAILS:  It rained all night (though not hard) and it was still raining while we were eating breakfast in the tent.  Brrr, it was cold, though!  We had just finished eating, when the sound of raindrops suddenly changed–and a quick look outside showed SNOW!  And not just pretty light snowflakes, but great big huge, wet glops falling from the sky.  It immediately began to accumulate on our tent, on the plants and trees.  Yikes!  So we hurried to finish packing up, eyeing the quickly building snow cover.  We had a terrible time with the tent–the snow was falling so fast and so heavy that we couldn’t keep it brushed off the tent long enough to get it folded up and packed away.

Finally Fixit said, “Forget this!” and just rolled the tent up, snow and all, then lashed it on top of his pack instead of stowing it neatly inside as usual.  We shouldered our packs and headed for the trail–what we could see of it!  The trail was also being quickly buried in snow.  Just when we were a few steps away from the trail, wham, I was hit with an incredible sort of “wave” of nausea, and oh no!  There went my nice breakfast I’d been enjoying only a half hour before.  I could not believe it.  I felt fine just a few minutes ago.

But I was determined to go on, and we started up the trail (we had been camped in a little dell).  A couple of minutes later, wham again–another round of throwing up, and I was feeling weird and wobbly.  What was this?  I sort of gritted my teeth and thought, “It’s 10 1/2 tough miles of steep, high trail to Rodgers Pass.  How will I ever make it at this rate?  I’ll just have to do the best I can.”  I tried to keep going, but a minute later I realized that my “other end” was about to lose it, too.  So I had to do a quick stop to take care of that.  Yuck.  I stood up and looked around.  The snow was building up really fast; even our footprints were rapidly filling in.  And that’s when I had a thought:  “It’s only 3 miles back, and mostly downhill, to Flesher Pass.  From there we could go down to Lincoln, and figure out what to do.”

I sort of staggered back over to the trail, where Fixit was patiently waiting, and it turned out he’d been starting to think the same thing.  “I don’t want to re-enact the Donner Party,” he said.  “They ended up not being able to go forward or back.  I think we’d better go back.”

We looked at how fast and heavy the snow was coming down, and without a word, we turned and headed for Flesher Pass.  I had a hard time at first, feeling very weak and wobbly, but after about a half hour of hiking, it was like my strength came back, the nausea totally disappeared, and I could hike right along in the fast-falling snow.  But I was still very puzzled over the whole thing.  Why did I get so sick so fast, and why am I now OK?  This is seriously weird.

Then I had another thought.  “Lord, I think You are in on this!  You sure know how to do tough love–was this the only way You could get our attention and get us to turn back?  Ouch!”  Fixit was busy thinking, too, as we walked through what had become a “winter wonderland” that was incredibly beautiful, but with a rapidly disappearing trail.  Finally he said, “I don’t know how long this weather will last or how long this snow will stick.  When we get down to the road, we can walk to the Lincoln highway, hitch into town, and then go back to the trail when the weather clears.”

(Note: We learned later from other hikers caught in the storm, that they did not even attempt to hike, but simply stayed in their tents all day)

Even though it was quite a descent to the road, the snow was still falling heavily when we got there.  And that was when we made a HUGE mistake.  Somehow we got our directions muddled, and instead of hiking west (to the right), we started going east.  Not knowing our mistake, we started walking.  But God was being REALLY good to us!  When we’d only been walking the wrong way for about 20 minutes, along came a pickup truck towing a trailer.  He stopped and said, “Need a ride?” and it turned out to be the same guy we’d talked to at the campground yesterday.  He remembered us and when he saw us hiking in the snowstorm, he wanted to help.

When we told him we were headed for Lincoln, he said, “Oh no!   You’re going the wrong way–this way goes to Helena!”  I looked at him and thought, “Wow, Lord, thank you for turning us around again!”  I figured it was no coincidence that the guy already knew us and that he “happened” to be headed home at just the right time to spot us.

The hunter guy was so kind–he offered to drive us all the way to Lincoln, but we said, “That’s OK, just a ride back to Flesher Pass would be a big help!”  So he turned around (he was headed for Helena), we tossed our very snowy packs in the back of his truck, and climbed into the cab (ahh, warm!) for a quick ride back up the hill.  The guy told us that the only reason he stopped was that he recognized us from yesterday.  He had given up hope of doing any hunting today when he saw the snow start.  “Normally this time of year it’s like 70 degrees and sunshine” he said.  Back at the Flesher Pass summit, the snow was now coming down so hard that it verged on a whiteout, and even the paved road was covered with white.  We assured the kind hunter that we would be fine, and that we were very grateful for his help, then we headed downhill toward the Lincoln highway, and he headed back for Helena.

We walked through the whiteout, saying, “Wow, if it’s this bad down here, I hate to think what it’s like up high on the trail!”  And we were also saying, “Thank you, Lord, thank you for turning us around and pointing us in the right direction!”  Once again, yet another assurance that He is watching over us.  I figure He’s saying, “I love you” and in spite of the cold and the heavy snow, I felt wonderful.

We had 6 miles to walk to the junction with  Rodgers Pass Road (which goes to Lincoln).  We figured that when we got there, we could hitch into Lincoln, wait till things cleared up, then hitch back to the junction and walk up the Rodgers Pass Road back to the trail.  That way, we can still leave a trail of our footprints from Mexico to Canada.  “And if we get to Rodgers Pass and the trail is full of deep snow and is un-doable, we will just keep walking, and walk by road all the way to Benchmark Ranch,” we decided.  “We’re not going to risk our lives trying to walk the high country in deep snow.  Yes, we have the Garmin, but it would still be crazy.”

As the miles went by, and the elevation was lower, the snow grew less, and finally changed to just a cold rain, and by the time we reached the junction, even the rain had stopped and the sun made a brief attempt to come out (sure felt good for a few minutes!).  We started trying to hitch, but it was tough.  The cars on the Rodgers Pass road were just flying by, and no one showed any interest in picking up two grubby hikers.

It was just starting to drip rain again, when a pickup truck came down from Flesher Pass.  The back of it was almost completely full with TWO dead elk (all cut up, but they were BIG!)  and in the cab were a guy and a gal.  They stopped to wait for a chance to turn toward Lincoln, and I ran up and begged for a ride.  “Sorry, I don’t have any room,” said the driver.  But I told him I thought Fixit could squeeze in back with the elk, and I could sit in the cab.  So he agreed.  We fitted our packs in between the elk, and Fixit scrunched up into a tiny space that was left.  He said it was sort of weird riding along facing a very dead bull elk head with its tongue hanging out, only a foot away from his face.  Meanwhile, I was having a good conversation with the elk hunter and his wife.  She said someday she would really like to hike the CDT and PCT.  And they both told me their opinion about the well-meant but totally wrong/stupid government policy of the last few years–introducing WOLVES to try to control the elk population, rather than letting the hunters take care of it.  “Wolves multiply a lot faster than deer or elk,” said the hunter. “And they don’t just kill for food.  They kill just for fun, too.  They’ve been killing a lot of the ranchers’ calves.  Those wolves are decimating the ranchers and even the small towns that depend on ranching and hunting business.”

Once we got to Lincoln, the hunter was supernice.  He could have just dropped us off anyplace, but he insisted on finding us a place to stay–he drove by 3 different places till he found one with a vacancy–the Three Bears Motel.  At one intersection, another guy stopped next to us and yelled, “Hey!  How’d you get those elk so quick?”  The hunter guy yelled back, “Did my homework!”  He explained to me that meant he’d done a lot of “survey” trips into the back country well before hunting season, and figured out where to set up his “stand”.  He doesn’t just wander around looking for elk.  He finds out where they go, and lets them come to him.  It only took him a half hour to “bag” his two big elk.

So now we are staying warm (it’s still very cold and wet outside) in a motel room, with our wet stuff hanging all over the place to dry.  The weather report is for more bad weather tomorrow, but clearing on Wednesday.  So we’ll hang out here in Lincoln for a day.  And we are so grateful to the Lord for sending us back to Flesher Pass, for sending one hunter to get us on the right track, and to the second hunter for his kindness in getting us here!