Montana Adventures!

  This weekend my little sister graduated from college! Congratulations Kayla! We are proud of you. She graduated from Montana State University, where Gavin and I graduated from. Her graduation was a great excuse to head out to Bozeman and my home town of Gardiner. Unfortunately that also meant that we had to miss the first training hike on Mt. Rainier. Richard was able to join them up to Pebble Creek. We’ll have to hear about how it went when we get home. To make up for not being able to join Pebble Creek, we brought our packs and hiking gear along with us. We went out for a hike today up Eagle Creek in the Gallatin National Forest right outside Gardiner. Its only about 3 miles up the Jardine road. Our goal for this hike was to get out and hike at a high elevation. Gardiner is around 5400 feet and the beginning of the hike was around 6200. The road heading up Eagle Creek is still closed from the winter so we started at the gate and walked the road. My sister decided that she didn’t want to hike so she took her mountain bike. There is a trail that cuts across all the switch backs that we took. The trail was a gradual uphill climb but not too steep. It was weird hiking out in the wide open; we are so use to the dense trees. My sister made it about a mile up the hill and decided that she couldn’t make it any farther so my dad took over on the bike. To prove the he could make it back up to where the road connected he pushed through! 

 

 

 

 

At the end of the trail we restarted back on the road to continue up another half mile to Casey Lake our destination goal. A couple of feet up the road we ran into some bear tracks! They appeared pretty fresh too! We are guessing that the bears were a grizzly and maybe two black bears that went through there. We think they where there last night during the rain storm. After seeing the tracks we were a little nervous that the bears were still around. Megan and I continued up the road ahead of the rest and I saw something move in the bushes ahead of us. I leaned over to Megan and whispered, “Megan don’t move!” She jumped thinking that it was a bear but I was pretty sure it was just a skunk. :) haha Sure enough it was a skunk, it started running down the road, I tried to catch a picture but I was too slow. Once at Casey Lake, we snapped a few photos. The elevation was around 7200 feet. So we made about a 1,000 foot elevation change but we had our packs at 30 pounds (Gavin carried a 5 lb can of paint) and hiked for 3.5 hours we think about 6 miles. We walked down a different way; down the road and off roading it by cutting through the switch backs. My dad cheated and road the bike the WHOLE way down! I mean all the way home! He almost hit a deer riding the bike too! It was quite entertaining. The worse part of the day was that I found two ticks on me! EWWWWW!