Great Bear Scouting Trip
In Explore this year, I will be helping Katie lead the backpacking specialization, which will be a 5-day trip in the Great Bear Wilderness, which is next to Glacier National Park in northern Montana. Near the end of the summer, Katie, Dennis, Jessica and I went and scouted out some of the area to get familiar with it for the specialization trip this fall. The Explore students all get to choose one of the four "Fall Skills" (rock climbing, kayaking, backpacking, and rafting) to get an extra week of specialized training in after rotating through the 4 skills with their team for 3 days each. Some highlights of the trip were: packing the most food I've ever eaten on a backpacking trip, even more than the Northshore Wilderness Adventure (we made chicken quesadilla's, fresh-picked huckleberry pancakes, tortilla pizza's, chimichanga's, lasagna (we dehyrdrated our own ground beef), toasted bagels with cinnamon sugar, and fried Italian dry salami with Tillamook pepper jack and colby jack cheese melted on top), getting off to a very late start and eating at Applebees and finally starting hiking at 6 pm, setting up one tent for the four of us in the dark before a big lighting and hail storm hit us, sleeping in the next day and swimming in an ice-cold crystal clear mountain lake and then eating breakfast from 11-12 pm, losing the trail for a while and bushwacking, Dennis falling off a rock and hitting his head on another rock while climbing down a steep, bouldery, dry creekbed, hiking late into the night again and finally just setting up our tent at the soonest relatively level (with big bushes to sleep on top of) spot we found (and then finding out we camped next to one of the many trees that grizzly bears habitually rub against--they put up strips of barbed wire on tons of trees to catch hair for DNA testing and counting), camping out near a sandbar along a river with grizzly bear tracks and near a cabin ranger station, surrounded by huckleberries, and near the place the rangers cash their fermented cow blood and fish guts that they use as grizzly bear bait (their wasn't any of the bait being stored there at the time though), finally seeing a grizzly (and a black bear) the last day about 60 ft away (he started huffing at us and I was trying to get my camera out and get a picture of him but he was behind a lot of trees and the rest of the group was trying to get me to keep on moving away), and of course the huge feast Dennis and I had at the end with all our leftover food. And then we were able to spend the last night in the guest cabin of the Shields'
