Thurs. August 2

Daily miles: 15.4
Cumulative miles: 32.9

I awake naturally just before dawn, break down the tent, and collect my food bag from the dining area. This process has not yet become routine and I fumble with the order of it all, accidentally packing my food before removing the day’s snacks. In a day or two every step will be second nature. I’m running about forty minutes behind my ideal start of 6.00 AM, but there’s no immediate rush today. I set off just as I hear the others emerging from their tents.

The overgrown trail is covered in a layer of dew and it’s still pretty dark. While the sun has reached the upper slopes above Nyack Creek, I remain tucked in a narrow mountain corridor of burned out trees and endless stretches of fireweed. It’s cold and wet, but I feel great and today’s trail should wind easily along Nyack Creek until it spills into the mighty Middle Fork Flathead River.

As the morning progresses, Nyack Creek plunges deeper and deeper into the gorge until it lies hundreds of feet below me to the left. The trail crosses several streams and I spend time at each one diligently removing my shoes and socks and then clipping them to my pack before carefully crossing. There are no bridges in the Nyack/Coal Creek area, a consequence of its special ruggedness. Even this late in the summer, there will be many more—and much larger—streams to cross in the coming days.

Some time in the late morning, I pass a man heading in the opposite direction + a fishing pole and a pistol holstered on his side. Some people are surprised to learn that firearms are permitted in National Parks. Hunting is obviously not allowed—so why have a gun? Well there’s really only two possibilities: it’s either for protection (against bears? people?) or it’s a manifestation of the psycho-sexual insecurity so common among second amendment fundamentalists. In truth, it’s probably a bit of both.

The protection argument at least, is simply not based in reality. You would have to be a crack shot with light speed reflexes to rapidly kill an aggressive brown bear. And you can forget about a Grizzly. Most attacks take people by surprise. On the other hand, numerous studies now show that bear spray is highly effective at deterring bear attacks.¹ So guns are pretty much useless in the backcountry of our National Parks. But maybe having a gun strapped to his side makes this guy feel like a Real Man™, just in case he needs to launch a spontaneous libertarian insurrection against a tyrannical government. Or maybe he’s just a douchebag with a gun in a place where guns don’t belong, the law notwithstanding.

In any case, the gun-bearing fisherman is the only person I encounter until I get much closer to the trailheads accessible from Highway 2 on the Park’s southwestern border. I pass the Lower Nyack Campground which looks dank and buggy. As the day gets warmer the mosquitos grow more and more insistent. By the early afternoon biting flies join in the feast and prod me to a brisk pace of four mph (according to the Garmin). Even at this speed, I’m barely outrunning the swarm and every time I stop, my legs are instantly covered in two dozen mosquitos and at least four or five biting flies each. Blood was shed in this stretch, make no mistake.

So far, I was not very impressed with the Nyack/Coal Creek Loop. At least the trail is easier to follow today but it remains in the woods for most of the day, obscuring the surrounding views. As far as I could tell, the eponymous creek was not markedly more impressive than any other creek one encounters in this part of the country—and the bugs were driving me to the edge of insanity.

By early afternoon, I reach the intersection with the border trail and follow it to a major crossing of Nyack Creek. There is no bridge, but the current is very gentle so there’s no real risk posed by a foot-crossing. Besides, it’s hot and I’m arriving at my undesignated destination for the day, so I welcome the opportunity to soak myself. I’m also tired and not thinking straight. As I enter the creek, I fail to notice that my water bottle—the only one I brought with me—becomes buoyant and pushes out from my backpack.

When I’m halfway across, I stop to look up and down the creek… and I see my water bottle floating downstream!

“Some idiot littering in Glacier National Park,” I think to myself in the split second before I realize what has actually transpired.

Frantically, I race to shore, drop my pack, and dive back into the creek after my water bottle, which I manage to retrieve with less difficulty than I deserve for making such a mistake.

Now where to camp? As I mentioned earlier, the Nyack/Coal Creek area is the only section of Glacier National Park in which “undesignated” camping is permitted, but now that I come to it there don’t seem to be any good spots available. The forest is extremely dense in this area and while scouting for a site, I discover what appears to be the remains of an old bridge that once spanned the creek here, now almost completely overgrown. I wonder when it was removed (or destroyed?).

Eventually, I find a tolerable spot to pitch the tent between two fallen trees a short distance from the creek. Still, there doesn’t seem to be anywhere to hang my food. The trees are all very large pines in this area with few branches lower than twenty feet above the ground. So I ultimately decide to wedge the Ursack I was loaned in Two Medicine under a large stone some distance from my camp. We’ll see if it’s as impenetrable as advertised.

Once my camp is set up, I rehydrate dinner (clam penne) and spend a long time swimming in the creek, which is somewhat warmer than the snowmelt streams elsewhere in the park. Later, as I’m reading the New Yorker and sipping tea with my feet in the water, I observe several helicopters flying overhead carrying massive shipments of lumber into the park’s interior. There must be some kind of construction going on.

Mosquitos eventually drive me from the creek and I read in my tent until it begins to get too dark. I spend a long time on the Garmin trying to send a message to Isabel before turning in for the night.

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^{1. Smith, Tom S., Stephen Herrero, Cali Strong Layton, Randy T. Larsen, and Kathryn R. Johnson. “Efficacy of Firearms for Bear Deterrence in Alaska.” The Journal of Wildlife Management 76, no. 5 (July 2012): 1021–27. See also Herrero, Stephen, and Andrew Higgins. “Field Use of Capsicum Spray as a Bear Deterrent.” Ursus 10 (1998): 533–37; Mazur, Rachel L. “Does Aversive Conditioning Reduce Human—Black Bear Conflict?” The Journal of Wildlife Management 74, no. 1 (2010): 48–54.↩}