{"id":612,"date":"2016-08-24T04:26:39","date_gmt":"2016-08-24T04:26:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/montybillpct.net\/blog2016\/?p=612"},"modified":"2017-06-22T18:28:34","modified_gmt":"2017-06-22T18:28:34","slug":"getting-through-the-burn-zone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/montybillpct.net\/blog2016\/2016\/08\/24\/getting-through-the-burn-zone\/","title":{"rendered":"Wednesday, August 24 Getting Through the Burn Zone"},"content":{"rendered":"

SUMMARY:\u00a0 <\/strong>There must have been a huge forest fire here a few years ago\u2014we spent most of today in burn zones. Some were messy, with lots of rocks and broken branch bits on the trail. Some were growing a crop of baby trees. And some had turned into “the blowdown obstacle course.”<\/p>\n

It was pretty bad in several places\u2014like trying to find your way through a giant game of Pick-Up-Stix. We collected some new scratches and bruises on our legs and joked about “Good thing we got lots of practice with this stuff in Wyoming!”<\/p>\n

Finally the trail got better and we were able to make good miles. It was cold all day, and partly cloudy including some dark gray ones that dropped on us a little bit.<\/p>\n

DETAILS:<\/strong>\u00a0 Since the days are getting so much shorter, we tried an experiment this morning, and it seemed to work well.\u00a0 We “got up” at 5:40, meaning, we sat up and dressed our “top half” (which meant down jacket, too–it’s cold!).\u00a0 We left our “bottom half” in the sleeping bags.\u00a0 Then we ate breakfast “in bed.”\u00a0 Then we finished the get up\/pack up routine, and it was light enough to see the trail.\u00a0 It worked!\u00a0 I think we will start doing this every morning.<\/p>\n

Well, most of the time today we were walking through burn zones.\u00a0 Apparently there was an enormous fire here a few years ago.\u00a0 Mountainside after mountainside was\u00a0 covered with dead, burned, falling down trees.\u00a0 It was so sad.\u00a0 A few areas were starting to recover and had baby trees growing.\u00a0 Some had a bit of grass among the burned tree skeletons.<\/p>\n

But then we reached the end of the “logged” trail.\u00a0 No\u00a0 trail crews with chain saws had gotten here yet, and it was an unbelievable mess.\u00a0 Actually, it got to the point where it was completely ridiculous–it was like trying to get through a game of GIANT “Pick-up-Stix”.\u00a0 We couldn’t just stand there and say, “This is impossible.”\u00a0 We HAD to get through it.\u00a0 So we just started joking about, “Well, good thing we got lots of practice on this stuff in Wyoming!”\u00a0 and “Hey, look, it’s the X-treme Blowdown event!”\u00a0 And we climbed and scrambled (collecting quite a few scratches and bruises).\u00a0 It took what seemed like forever, but finally we were across the mess and back on regular trail.\u00a0 And another good thing was–clouds!\u00a0 It was cloudy and even dripped just a bit.\u00a0 Much better than going through this under a hot sun!\u00a0 The clouds ended up hanging around with a few drips, most of the day.<\/p>\n

To add to the fun, we were now almost out of water and had a very late lunch so that we could reach the next water source–a creek.\u00a0 After that, for awhile, we were back in a “green zone” (so nice!) but then it was back into the burn zone again.\u00a0 This burn zone was mostly just rocky and messy–no blowdowns.<\/p>\n

Later in the afternoon, I noticed that the mountains were changing–getting much more rocky and steep and dramatic-looking.\u00a0 There were also some lakes!\u00a0 We passed Phlox Lake–very pretty, with beautiful, crystal clear water.\u00a0 And we finally made it out of the burn zones, which was nice.<\/p>\n

At 7:00 we started looking for a place to camp–not easy.\u00a0 Everything was steep hillsides and not many clear places.\u00a0 Down below the trail I saw what looked like a potential camping spot and went to have a look.\u00a0 Near the spot I had in mind, there was a hole in the ground, which I started to step over but suddenly the ground gave way and down I went, doing a bad scrape on both my shins.\u00a0 It hurt something awful.\u00a0 For a couple of minutes I could not even stand up.\u00a0 Finally I dragged myself up and limped back to the trail and a short time later we spotted a reasonably flat place in the forest.\u00a0 The only drawback to it was…lots of BEAR poop nearby.\u00a0 Oh well.<\/p>\n

Every step I took was hurting, but a check of my shins showed yes, lots of bad scraping and some bleeding, but nothing that looked serious.\u00a0 Shins don’t like being banged or scraped–they make such a fuss.\u00a0 And in spite of the blowdown slowdown, we still made almost 25 miles today.\u00a0 Hopefully tomorrow we will finally reach the “beautiful Pintlers” that everybody talks about.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

SUMMARY:\u00a0 There must have been a huge forest fire here a few years ago\u2014we spent most of today in burn zones. Some were messy, with lots of rocks and broken branch bits on the trail. Some were growing a crop of baby trees. And some had turned into “the blowdown obstacle course.” It was pretty […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-612","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-montana"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/montybillpct.net\/blog2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/612","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=612"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/montybillpct.net\/blog2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/612\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1032,"href":"https:\/\/montybillpct.net\/blog2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/612\/revisions\/1032"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/montybillpct.net\/blog2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=612"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montybillpct.net\/blog2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=612"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montybillpct.net\/blog2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=612"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}