Multi-day overnight backpacking and canoe trips

The last of the great western wilderness ecosystems that I’ll discuss in this series is in northern Montana, crossing the Canadian border to include Waterton Lakes National Park in Alberta plus some smaller adjacent wildlands in British Columbia. The vast bulk of this rugged wild ecosystem, though, is in the U.S., and includes Glacier National Park, the huge Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex, the Mission and Rattlesnake Mountains, plus adjacent wild and semi-wild lands in western Montana’s Swan Valley. And the east slope of these mountains include the Rocky Mountain Front where prairie and mountains collide. This big and wild region is called the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem (NCDE) or simply the Glacier Park-Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex. The Bob Marshall Wilderness lies just south of Glacier National Park.

Big Wild Adventures runs its guided backpacking treks in the Bob Marshall Wilderness Area, the biggest chunk of wild country in the NCDE, named for one of the founding fathers of the Wilderness idea in the United States. Bob Marshall was a visionary forester who not only co-founded The Wilderness Society (which was a great organization until the late 1970’s when it became overly politicized and abandoned its original mission), but also convinced the Forest Service to begin adding protected Wilderness and Primitive Areas to its then limited Wilderness resume’ (which until Bob Marshall came along, included only the Gila Wilderness in southwestern New Mexico).

Perhaps the most dramatic part of this mountainous land of forest, river valley, meadow, peak, and gigantic limestone wall is the Rocky Mountain Front, where the Great Plains landscape suddenly morphs into rugged mountains that quickly rise to the Continental Divide. Our guided hiking treks in “The Bob” begin in the mountains near the prairie interface, and our routes take us up spectacular stream valleys to the Continental Divide — and across it in years when early summer snowpack allows. In any event, the scenery is spectacular and wildlife is abundant. Big herds of elk, bighorn sheep and mountain goat thrive on “The Front”, and the entire wilderness complex supports grizzly and black bear, gray wolf, wolverine, lynx and many other wilderness dependent animals. In all my years guiding, I’ve seen one lynx, and that was in The Bob. And one of my most memorable griz sightings while guiding for Big Wild was atop the Great Divide along the Rocky Mountain Front where we watched a sow grizzly with two cubs for hours. Mama bear was feeding but the two cubs were joyfully playing on an adjacent snowfield, redundantly climbing it and then sliding down in a variety of positions including head first, feet first and every other ursine contortion that you might imagine! What a show!

We cannot guarantee a grizzly body-sledding show if you sign up for this trek. But we can guarantee a real big and wild experience in The Bob, Glacier Park’s wilder sister.

Our guided Montana backpacking trips include a walk through the rugged Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness along the Montana/Idaho border, just to the southwest of Missoula, home of the University of Montana. For this trip, we meet our groups in Missoula. Although over half of the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness is in Idaho, our guided hiking routes are in Montana, where the eastern third of this vast Wilderness is a land of rugged granitic peaks rising in spectacular fashion above lovely subalpine lake basins and densely forested canyons filled with huge coniferous trees.

In previous posts I discussed our guided backpacking tours in some of the great remaining wilderness complexes of the United States: the Utah Canyon country, Greater Yellowstone and Greater Gila Wilderness complexes. The Salmon-Selway country — named after its two great wilderness rivers — of central Idaho and far western Montana is the only wild-land ecosystem in the lower 48 states that compares with the Greater Yellowstone in terms of size. Unfortunately, though, there’s no national park in its wild core, so unlike the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, there’s no central game preserve where wildlife is fully protected. However, the Greater Salmon-Selway Ecosystem’s centerpiece is the huge Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness and it’s neighbor to the north, the Selway-Bitterroot, which is nearly as large. And these two huge chunks of wild country are separated only by a narrow dirt road. They are also surrounded by millions of acres of mostly still-wild national forest roadless areas, that could be added to the National Wilderness Preservation System (and that are in many cases, severely threatened by development and off-road vehicle abuse). At 2.3 million protected acres, the River of No Return is the largest Wilderness Area in the lower 48 states. Yet the furthest distance from a road that it is possible to be in the lower 48 states is not in the river of No Return Wilderness, but is in northwest Wyoming just beyond the southeast corner of Yellowstone National Park. Nonetheless, though, when you’re out in the Salmon-Selway wilds, you know you’re in big wilderness! And that includes the Selway-Bitterroot.

Looking for a guided backpack trip in the northern Rocky Mountains in wild country that few Americans are aware of other than locals?  Looking for a trek that has spectacular alpine scenery as stunning as the wilds of Glacier Park or the amazing Beartooths? Not to mention some of the most spectacular glacial-cut mountain stream canyons in the world? If so, our guided Montana backpack trip in the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness is for you! We nearly always run this trek in July, it is rated “fairly strenuous”.  And it will provide an experience that merges the flora of the Rocky Mountain region with that of the lush Pacific Northwest. Come and join us in the big trees and big peaks!

Guided wilderness backpacking and camping tours in the Western U.S. can include nearly every kind of landscape imaginable, from hot arid desert to dank rainforest to icy alpine tundra….and everything in between. In the previous couple of posts, I’ve discussed two of our great western wild-land complexes: the Canyon Country wilds of southern Utah and the incomparable Greater Yellowstone National Park Ecosystem.

Yet the history of Wilderness preservation in the U.S. begins in New Mexico. That’s where legendary ecologist Aldo Leopold convinced his reluctant associates in the U.S. Forest Service to set aside over a half million acres in the headwaters high country of the Gila River, as the nation’s first official protected Wilderness Area, the Gila. Of course, the Wilderness Act of 1964 — which provided for Congressional protection — came forty years later, so the first Wilderness Areas were delineated by the Forest Service as administrative designations, that could easily be undone by the stroke of a pen. That’s what happened with a portion of the Gila, when in the early 1930’s the Forest Service de-classified a corridor through the original Gila Wilderness so they could build the new “North Star Road”. Ironically, the area to the east of the non-wilderness road corridor is a now separate Wilderness Area named for Aldo Leopold.

The Gila and the Aldo Leopold Wilderness Areas, along with the Blue Range Wilderness just a few miles to the west (extending into eastern Arizona), constitute the greatest mostly undisturbed forested highland region of the American Southwest. Like Yellowstone, the Gila complex is mostly a volcanic landscape, with lava plateaus cut by river canyons and framed by big surrounding mountains. We run a wonderful seven day guided wilderness backpack trip in the Gila Wilderness during each April of odd-numbered years. So start to think about 2019 now! The Gila is an amazing land of mountains, mesas, rugged river canyons, grasslands, pinyon-juniper woodlands, savannas and extensive forests. In fact, the world’s largest remaining virgin ponderosa pine forest is in the Gila, and we explore a big chunk of this grassy open wonderland of huge pine trees. There are elk, mule deer, black bear, bobcat, ringtail and even a small endangered population of the Mexican gray wolf, which was reintroduced into the Gila in the late ’90’s. So make your plans now to join us in the heart of this big southwestern wilderness complex, the “Yellowstone of the American Southwest”.

In the previous blog about Utah’s canyon country, I discussed a number of the West’s remaining “wildland complex’s” or “wilderness ecosystems”. Aside from these geographic regions having great recreational opportunities, what is so special about them? Well, each complex has its own attractions, but as a generalization, it’s all about the wilderness! That’s because native vegetation communities and many wildlife species need large areas of undisturbed terrain, so these wildland complexes are the most ecologically intact regions of the country!

For example, let’s look at the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (GYE), which includes Yellowstone National Park plus roughly 15 million acres of surrounding mostly public wildlands. Big designated Wilderness areas abut most of the park’s boundaries, and at least 3 million acres of unprotected roadless areas also punctuate the wildness of the GYE. The Greater Yellowstone occupies northwest Wyoming, southern Montana and a bit along the eastern edge of Idaho. And although Yellowstone backpacking and backpacking in the surrounding Wilderness areas are my livelihood, efforts to protect wild country in the Greater Yellowstone are not and must not be primarily about recreation!

In fact, the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem is one of the greatest and most ecologically complete areas of wild country remaining in the Earth’s temperate latitudes! A full compliment of large carnivores persists, including grizzly and black bear, wolf, coyote, lynx, wolverine and mountain lion! Moreover, the GYE is the only remaining region in the lower 48 states where every vertebrate species known to have existed in pre-European times still survives, at least to some extent. Including wild bison that are genetically intact without cattle genes. Think about it. It’s 2018 and regions as wild and intact as the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem are rare gems indeed!

Of course, some two-legged hominids see the GYE primarily in terms of timber, oil, mining potential, livestock forage, or as playgrounds — outdoor gymnasiums, if you will — for lazy humans and their expensive wheeled or tracked toys. That’s unfortunate, and some of these folks are vitriolic in their efforts to thwart efforts toward additional land protections.  The clock is ticking. Around the globe, few wild places that aren’t legally protected will survive this century. We need more Wilderness designations, more national parks, more land protections in general, and we need protections for every square inch of remaining wild country. In 21st century America, there will always be enough roads, cities, strip malls, oil rigs and sacrifice zones where off-road machines have damaged or destroyed nature. There will never be enough wilderness. The Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem is unique, and still gives us the chance to do something right. Let’s protect all that still remains wild — and then some — for at least some damaged areas can still be restored. And let’s never ever compromise away the essence of wild nature in the unique and unequaled Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.

The spectacular canyon country of the American Southwest is an iconic landscape, popularized by Hollywood’s cinematic shootouts and horse-chases set amidst a colorful landscape of sandstone buttes, mesas and canyons. These landscapes are mostly associated with the southern half of Utah, but the canyon country — which really refers to the Colorado Plateau geologic province — actually includes southern and southeastern Utah, the southwestern corner of Colorado, a good chunk of northwestern New Mexico plus northern Arizona including the Grand Canyon. Our Big Wild canyon country treks are all in southern and southeastern Utah, in areas that, like the Yellowstone backcountry, are much less crowded than the Grand Canyon. Our guided Utah hiking treks in the Escalante Canyons, the Grand Staircase backcountry and in Canyonlands National park are second to none!

What’s so special about this red-rock canyon country bio-region? Aside from the unusual and dramatic landscape, much of the region is still wild! Embedded within it’s unconfined borders are Canyonlands, Arches, Capitol Reef, Bryce Canyon and Zion National Parks, the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, the new and (hopefully temporarily) reduced Bears Ears National Monument plus several more protected parks, monuments and Wildernesses. In addition, there are millions of acres of unprotected public land road-less areas: these de-facto wildernesses are in many cases threatened by development and resource extraction, but they could be designated as Wilderness areas under the Wilderness Act of 1964. Yes, so much of landscape remains wild! In fact, the “Colorado Plateau Wildland Complex” is one of the great wild-land complexes of the American West where wilderness and near-wilderness lands, generally in close proximity to one another, dominate the landscape. Some of the other great wildland complexes of the West are the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, the Glacier Park-Bob Marshall (“Northern continental Divide”) Ecosystem in northern Montana, the Salmon-Selway Ecosystem of central Idaho, the North Cascades Complex of northern Washington, California’s Sierra Nevada-Mojave Desert Complex, and the greater Gila/Black Range/Blue Range complex in southwestern New Mexico and eastern Arizona.

Back to southern Utah. Backpacking is Utah canyon country can be a challenge if you don’t know the terrain. Routes that look good on the map can suddenly be blocked by vertical cliff bands, and so you get “rimmed” on the way down or “boxed” on attempted up-canyon routes. Fortunately, our Big Wild Adventures hiking guides know the terrain, so getting blocked by cliffs is rarely a problem. And the red-rock canyon walls, spacious slickrock mesas, lush green riparian habitats, ruins and petroglyphs plus deep black starry skies a long ways from city lights make for an unforgettable wilderness experience. Don’t miss out!

Hiking and Horses are the two primary methods of moving through the wondrous back-country of Yellowstone, the worlds first national park. In fact, the same goes for most western wilderness areas, although rafting, canoeing and back-country skiing are other popular modes of back-country transport. Horses, though, do pose some unique safety issues when they encounter backpackers and day-hikers.

The last thing we need on a narrow mountain trail is a quasi-rodeo! Bucking horses and/or mules plus gear and humans flying through space and rolling down steep mountainsides can ruin an otherwise peaceful day in the wilderness. That’s right, although a hiker could certainly get stomped or kicked, the biggest danger of a hiker/horse-packer encounter is to the horse-packer and his/her animals, rather than the hiker. After all, it is not the Yellowstone backpacker who sits atop a thousand pound four-legged sometimes skittish beast! Narrow trails that cut across steep mountainsides pose a particular danger, for there are no passing lanes in the wilderness. So if you don’t want to be responsible for the untimely demise of one or more of your fellow two-leggeds, you need to follow a couple of easy protocols.

Simply put, the best way to avoid a wilderness rodeo is to get out of the way. Way out of the way! Make sure that you get off the trail to let the horses pass, preferably at least 15-20 feet, which sounds easy, but can be problematic on a steep slope or in dense timber.  And don’t create a gauntlet for the string of horses and mules to pass through. Make sure that everyone in the guided Yellowstone hiking group moves to the same side of the trail so that the horses don’t feel surrounded. Most horse-packers also like hikers to talk to the animals as the pack-string passes, to let the beasts know that you are just a bunch of funny looking humans with big things on your backs. Say anything. The specifics don’t matter to the horses, though they might to the folks riding them.

It will soon be springtime in the Rockies! Okay, as I write this it is only early February, but spring will be here soon enough. Trust me, it will happen. Snow will melt, grass will green-up, buds will expand and birds will return. And when this annual transformation occurs, you can count on mountain rivers and streams swollen with snow-melt. And you can also count on ticks.

First the good news: The deer tick that carries Lyme Disease is non-existent in most of the high Rockies where we run guided backpack trips in Wyoming and Montana. It’s a good thing, too, because those little buggers are difficult to detect. By contrast, the wood tick — which can carry either Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever or Colorado Tick Fever — is a bigger, flat-bodied usually reddish-brown annoyance that is relatively easy to detect — if you take the time to look. More on that later. Now, though, here’s the bad news: our guided hiking tours in Yellowstone and elsewhere in the northern Rockies are in wood-tick country. And if you’re out in the big wilds between mid-April and late June, you just might encounter this little parasite.

But fear not! A bit of vigilance will derail any tick-related problems. More good news is that a tick must be embedded in your anatomy for quite a few hours in order to transmit either disease. Moreover, in the areas we visit in the spring, the incidence of either tick-carried fever — and both can be cured with antibiotics — are very low. And because the wood tick is fairly large and obvious, if you do a tick check in the morning and again in the evening, and carefully remove any of the little hitchhikers (with either fingers or tweezers, being careful not to leave the head embedded — and then wash the area!), you’ll be fine. In fact, our clients rarely find any ticks, even on our June trips, but better safe than sorry. And besides, doing tick checks can be utilized as foreplay if your sex partner is along on the trip with you!

Even if you’re on your own, though, you needn’t lose any sleep about ticks, at least on any of our guided Yellowstone hikes or any of our other trips in the mountain West. They simply aren’t too abundant where we go, and just a little vigilance once you’re on the trail will head off any potential problems.

Don’t let the name of this trek fool you into thinking it is in the exact same chunk of wild country as our late April walk in the Grand Staircase backcountry. This October 14-19 Red-rock Canyons of the Wild Escalante trip is nearly 100 miles from our April Grand Staircase route, and is in the actual canyons of the incomparable Escalante River, perhaps the ultimate red-rock canyon country wilderness!

Those of you who’ve backpacked with us before know that our Yellowstone Backpacking treks are in many ways our specialty. But we’ve also guided in Canyon country since the early 1980’s. One area we avoid, though, is the Grand Canyon, simply because the back-country use there and the competition for permits is too intense, unlike the situation in Yellowstone, where the wild back-country is relatively un-populated by humans. The same can be said for the Escalante Canyons: they are a magnificent realm of canyon and mesa and river and stream set in the colorful Colorado Plateau high desert — and this wild-land provides every bit as scenic and rewarding a backpack experience as does the Grand Canyon, but without the crowds.

As noted in the previous blog, this entire landscape is threatened by the Trump Administrations’ partnership with cattle growers, miners, oil drillers, off-road vehicle abusers and just about anyone who hopes to cut, dig, drill, scrape or ride thrillcraft across and through this fragile desert landscape. For the time being, though, the Escalante Canyons are still wild. Don’t miss the opportunity to experience that wildness next October!

Our April 23-28 canyon country backpack trip is a wonderful walk through the fairly large but relatively little-known Paria-Hackberry Roadless Area. This chunk of wild southern Utah is a land of expansive juniper-dotted sandstone mesas cut by rugged steep walled canyons with clear streams and lush riparian vegetation. There are slots, arches and big red canyon walls! We rate this trip “fairly strenuous”, mainly because on one day we will pack water up to a dry campsite at the high point of a mesa with a spectacular view. But aside from that, most of the walking is pretty mellow.

But first things first. A billionaire real estate developer from new York City, who knows nothing about public lands, sits in the Oval Office and is working with his cronies to dismantle many public land protections. As you probably know, the Trumpeteers have dismantled much of the Escalante-Grand Staircase National Monument. This won’t affect our trip, at least in the short term, because the Paria-Hackberry is an official Wilderness Study Area that pre-dates the National Monument (designated by President Clinton). So the BLM is legally required to manage it for the perpetuation of wilderness character. For now.

Nonetheless, if the monument reduction holds up in the courts, adjacent lands will see an increase in off-road vehicle abuse, over-grazing and maybe even mining, oil-drilling and the new roads that always accompany such examples of wild-land industrial development, and this will indeed impact the Paria-Hackberry. So stay tuned. Join Wilderness Watch and the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance. And by all means, sign up for this great guided Utah backpacking trip while the backpacking is still a wild experience!

This is one of our mellower treks, and if the thought of spectacular multi-colored sandstone canyons, with a cool desert stream, lush riparian vegetation and numerous ancient ruins and pictographs interests you, then don’t miss the opportunity to sign up for our April 16-21 trek in Canyonlands National Park! I said “mellow”. That’s because we drive to the high point, at the start of the trip. Which means that once we begin the hike on BLM land just outside the park boundary, we descend into the main canyon and from there on, it is all pretty level or slightly downhill — until the end of the trip, six days and about 30 miles later. Except for a couple of modest uphills on optional day-hikes, your biggest elevation gain with a backpack will be about 50 feet. That’s all!

All this and more in a magnificent high desert setting. Weather in the southern Utah canyon country during April is usually pretty good. The intense heat of late spring and summer has yet to arrive; yet nights can be frosty, usually with mild sunny afternoons. But don’t ignore our Clothing/Personal Gear List: bring what is on it, because occasional cold spring storms do occur some years.

This trip begins and ends in the once lovely little town of Moab, Utah, nestled in the red-rocks along the Colorado River. OK, it’s been a long time since Moab was lovely. Smaller is better by my way of thinking, and Moab is no longer small — though it’s all relative. And for someone from Philadelphia, for instance, Moab might indeed seem like a quaint little town. At least the uranium mill is long since shut down. But nowadays, the industrial tourist invasion is pretty much year round, with an overabundance of off-road motor vehicles —  motorcycles, jeeps and four-wheelers — utilized by modern canyon country “wreckreationists” flirting with high blood pressure, diabetes and other sedentary lifestyle-induced diseases. And then there are the mountain bikers, adrenaline junkies who think of the canyon country as little more than an outdoor gymnasium. Don’t get me started…. Fortunately, though, there’s still room for those of us who simply wish to experience and enjoy wild nature without mechanized transportation, and backpacking in Canyonlands National Park’s back-country is a great way to do just that!

And “just that” is a wild walk through big stream canyons lush with cottonwood and willow, framed by impossibly colorful rock spires and vertical sandstone cliffs. The pungent smell of sagebrush and juniper will enthrall you, and who knows, maybe the ghosts of the ancient ones will haunt you at night under the spectacularly starry Utah high desert sky.