Day 5

This post is a part of a series on my three and a half week adventure road tripping to the west coast with three of my best friends in the Summer of 2018. I was challenged to write every day of the trip to document the adventure, so I did! My aim was to be as real and raw as possible while I was documenting and writing. Because of this, some days, I was honestly just not interested in writing, so I wrote very matter of fact “this is what we did.”

Check out the first part of the series here: Day 1 or check out a list of the days here: WCT2018

I wrote everything on my phone’s notes app, and below is word-for-word what I wrote each day. Nothing taken out, no elaborations.

As part of the challenge, I also made sure to take at least one picture every day, and each evening when I wrote, I picked one photo that I wanted to feature from that day. Some days it was hard to pick them, and other days I had only one to pick from.

A couple of notes: Each day that I wrote, I wrote the date, where I was writing from, and how many pictures I had taken that day. So the location doesn’t always reflect where the picture was taken.

July 26th
Foot Elizabeth Lake Campground - Inside Glacier National Park.
Pictures taken: 56

We finally were able to get on the trail with our big packs to do some backcountry backpacking and camping. We dropped Jen’s car off at the Many Glacier campsite, then drove the Suburban to the Many Glacier entrance station. We took a cutoff trail from there. It cutoff about 2 miles of the trail, but added it in steepness. We had a hard two mile hike to where we met up with the trail again.

We took the trail around Swiftcurrent Ridge Lake, around Poia Lake, then over the Redgap Pass, then down here to Elizabeth Lake to the Campground. We think all-in-all we hiked about 16 miles today. And there was definitely some serious terrain. Getting up to Redgap was a grueling task, but we all made it, and celebrated with lunch (And then we were promptly chased off the ridge of the mountain by a big lightning storm.)

Once we got to our campsite, it looked like rain was coming, so after putting our food in the bear boxes, we set up our tent, and now, us four guys are in our tent, and Jen in hers hoping to wait out the rain so we can make some much needed dinner. Excited to finally be out in the woods away from people. Only saw one couple on the trail today. Tomorrow is going to be a hard, early day, but it will be good.