{"id":586,"date":"2016-08-11T04:42:46","date_gmt":"2016-08-11T04:42:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/montybillpct.net\/blog2016\/?p=586"},"modified":"2017-06-07T14:45:57","modified_gmt":"2017-06-07T14:45:57","slug":"great-another-big-hill","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/montybillpct.net\/blog2016\/2016\/08\/11\/great-another-big-hill\/","title":{"rendered":"Thursday, August 11 Great\u2014Another Big Hill! LIMA"},"content":{"rendered":"

SUMMARY:\u00a0 <\/strong>We had 22 miles to do today in order to reach I-15 and a ride to Lima, Montana. We figured “no problem.” But the trail had other ideas. In the morning and afternoon, we faced very long and quite frankly, insanely steep hill climbs, where our speed reduced to a crawl. We toughed it out, though.<\/p>\n

The rest of the time was lovely walking way up high, through open meadows and green forest groves. Once we got the afternoon killer climb done, we really pushed it, with the goal of reaching Lima as soon as we could. Dark clouds were building and thunder rumbling, to speed us on our way.<\/p>\n

At first we could not get any cell service to call the motel in Lima, but all of a sudden it worked, and 20 minutes later, the guy from the motel picked us up as we waited on the shoulder of the freeway. Tonight it’s late, but I am still doing our laundry. We hope to be back on the trail tomorrow.<\/p>\n

DETAILS:<\/strong>\u00a0 After we’d been hiking for awhile this morning, we realized it was a VERY good thing that we stopped when we did last night–after our nice campsite, it was mile after mile of hip-high, overgrown plants with not a campsite possibility anywhere.\u00a0 I’m glad to see plants all green and thriving, but they also make for tougher hiking–my trek poles kept getting tangled in the plants, and I had to yank them loose.<\/p>\n

Then we went through an area where the trees were pretty much all dead.\u00a0 There was no sign of a fire and the trees were far apart.\u00a0 Bummer.\u00a0 Then we came to what I can only describe as an INSANELY steep, long climb up a mountain.\u00a0 Man, was I glad we were going UP it, not down!\u00a0 I kept thinking, “This is crazy!\u00a0 Do they seriously call this a trail?”\u00a0 Fixit and I were both totally wasted by the time we reached the top.\u00a0 But I was glad to see that the going down part was not as bad.\u00a0 I feel sorry for the SOBO’s who had to deal with this.\u00a0 We were just glad that the insane climb was in nice cool forest, not out in the hot sun!\u00a0 Other than that climb, though, we were out on top of the Divide, with great, sweeping views.\u00a0 Nice!\u00a0 Up ahead, on the horizon, were what looked like a lot of very impressive rocks–we speculated about whether we’d be going through them.<\/p>\n

In the morning, we also came to several junctions where it was not clear which way to go, but again, the Garmin + Bear maps came to our rescue.\u00a0 The Garmin sure is saving us a lot of “lost” time!\u00a0 Two of the junctions did have stick-in-the-dirt signs made by hikers, consisting of an arrow made of sticks, pointing to the CDT trail.\u00a0 But since there was no clear indication that the arrow was pointing to the CDT, we still checked with the Garmin.<\/p>\n

After lunch, we were resolved to do the remaining 12 miles and get in to Lima by tonight, but in the afternoon we came to another insanely steep, long climb.\u00a0 Again, we had to slow to a crawl, and almost gave up hope of making Lima.\u00a0 But then it turned out that the last 5 miles of the CDT route before I-15 were on ranch roads, and mostly downhill.\u00a0 We turned on the afterburners and hiked as fast as we could!\u00a0 Overhead, black clouds were building and thunder was rumbling.\u00a0 About 3 miles before the highway, we were suddenly hit with a very fierce, cold wind, accompanied by splatters of rain.\u00a0 It was crazy wild for about 15 minutes.<\/p>\n

Finally we reached I-15 and tried to call the motel in Lima…but oh bummer, no service for our phone.\u00a0 On the south side of the highway, where we were, there were no houses, but it looked like on the other side, we might be able to get to a ranch house and see if we could call from there.\u00a0 So we went under the freeway and walked along the “frontage road” till we came to a side road where we could see what looked like a ranch.\u00a0 Fixit is not at all fond of asking for things, so he said he’d wait while I walked down the road to see if anybody was home at the ranch.\u00a0 But on an impulse, I decided to give our phone another try.\u00a0 We had heard that cell phone service out here was “spotty”.\u00a0 And hooray!\u00a0\u00a0 It WORKED!\u00a0 I was able to call the motel, and the guy said, “OK, I’ll come get you.”\u00a0 “Where do we meet you?” I asked.\u00a0 “Oh, just jump the fence and stand by the side of the freeway.\u00a0 I’ll see you,”\u00a0 he said.<\/p>\n

Um…OK….we felt really weird doing that, but we did “jump the fence” and stood along the highway.\u00a0 Twenty minutes later, and we were in the motel guy’s car (along with his very friendly dog), headed for Lima.\u00a0 Then it was showers and dinner, and even though now it was late, I had to do the laundry, because the motel laundry is being used by the owners till noon tomorrow.\u00a0 I don’t want to wait till noon, just to start doing laundry.\u00a0 So now it’s 9:00 pm and I am sitting in the laundry room.\u00a0 Oh well!\u00a0 What a day!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

SUMMARY:\u00a0 We had 22 miles to do today in order to reach I-15 and a ride to Lima, Montana. We figured “no problem.” But the trail had other ideas. In the morning and afternoon, we faced very long and quite frankly, insanely steep hill climbs, where our speed reduced to a crawl. We toughed it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-586","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-idaho","category-montana"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/montybillpct.net\/blog2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/586","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/montybillpct.net\/blog2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/montybillpct.net\/blog2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montybillpct.net\/blog2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montybillpct.net\/blog2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=586"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/montybillpct.net\/blog2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/586\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1002,"href":"https:\/\/montybillpct.net\/blog2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/586\/revisions\/1002"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/montybillpct.net\/blog2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=586"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montybillpct.net\/blog2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=586"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montybillpct.net\/blog2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=586"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}