Day miles: 3.8 (3.8 miles to wrap up my thru-hike, though I hiked 25 to get to my campsite for the night)
Trip miles: 2581.5
It is impossible to predict the feelings that will come at the end of a long quest when one is just beginning the journey. Success is not guaranteed; in fact, if the quest is a sufficient enough challenge, success is unlikely. But even the most confident of protagonists cannot know for certain what those final moments will feel like – what emotions will come waking up on that last day.
I had spent very little time thinking about the end of my hike and what I might feel. I had spent a little time contemplating what I might do post hike, but I had not really considered the end itself, other than to buy one canned kombucha and a twin pack of Hostess cupcakes for celebratory consumption. Over thousands of miles and five states, I had simply focused on getting here, to this final day.
I never took for granted that any one day could take me out, either physically, or more likely through the betrayal of my own mind. Just two days ago I had fallen hard, concerned about a possible break in my leg. Imagine that! Honestly, I probably would have just hiked on it anyway, unless the broken bone were literally piercing my skin.
There were many moments along the way where I wanted to quit, not due to any one thing, but more like a death by a thousand cuts – lightning and hail storms, borderline hypothermia, the pain of endless rocky jeep roads on my feet, the pinched nerve in my shoulder I had suffered since New Mexico, loneliness and anxiety about my economic future. Just as weather wears down mountains over time, so too had I been worn down.
Nevertheless, like the mountains I had simply carried on, accepting this whittling down of the body and mind as an unavoidable part of the journey. To survive the tests and trials of the mountains, one must become a mountain. One cannot overcome a hardship without experiencing it and one cannot finish a journey that is never begun. And a journey of great length, suffering, and joy, cannot be completed until every footstep has been taken, every fear passed, every drop of blood shed, and every smile formed.
Up until this morning, I just put one foot in front of the other, with the simple goal of getting here – getting to the last day. Well, here I was. I woke up early in the dark, felt the cold ground under my back, and peed unceremoniously out of the vestibule of my tent. I felt nothing really, other than a heavy awareness that today was different. I approached my morning just as I had all the others, packing up my tent, getting my food bag down from the pole, and getting ready to walk. The two section hikers were still in their tents. As the first light filled the sky, and without eating breakfast, I visited the privy and took off. I had a hike to finish.
I had time to think as I pushed through the overgrown trail. It was less than 4 miles to the border marker. In a little over an hour, I would be in Canada and my goal would be complete. Perhaps I was quite calm because I still had a full day of hiking ahead of me. I knew that, post celebration, I would have to hike the rest of the day to get to my campsite for the night. I would then need to hike tomorrow morning to get out of the park. For that reason, reaching the border seemed a little less “final.”
But it was final; it was the final push, and as I hiked further I started to get nervous about silly things. I wondered if people would be there. I secretly hoped I would have a few moments alone, rather than showing up to a crowd. I knew Axel and T Dubs would be there at some point. I was happy about this. As much as I wanted a bit of alone time, I definitely hoped to be able to share that moment with the only people who could possibly understand – other thru-hikers.
After pushing through the brush for a while, the trail got a bit closer to the edge of Waterton Lake. It looked beautiful in the morning light, though it was quite hazy from smoke. It was a clear morning and the sun began to peek up from the mountains that lined its eastern shore. I found myself quickening my pace, a tight feeling filled my guts and wrapped around me. My whole body, the vessel I had pushed and abused to make it here, twisted into a ball of anxious, knotted tension. I marched through the thimble berry bushes and overgrowth that lined the trail, moving faster, my legs like two giant sticks beating back the trail brush. New scratches appeared; new blood was drawn. I felt none of it. All I could do was look up into the distance and search for the first sight of the end.
The breeze picked up across the lake as the sun lifted the entirety of its silhouette above the ridge of the mountains, casting its rays down with finality. Its shimmering rays danced on the surface of the water, announcing the start of the day. The hazy, smoky sky contributed the illusion of dusk to this portrait and created an almost apocalyptic feel to the morning light.
The last quarter mile felt like slow motion. I knew I was almost there. I craned my neck as I moved, pushing one last time as if my life depended on it. This final burst of urgency felt like the burning of all my reserves. Whatever I had left, I was going to leave it here, in this place that I had walked over 2500 miles to reach. And then, I saw it.
What wasn’t in my field of vision now suddenly was. I could see the monument in a clearing by the water. To my surprise, there were actually two boundary markers. Two obelisks stood interrupting the rays of the sun, slightly taller than myself, but not by much. This was it. This was the end. I walked over to the border marker closest to the water and touched it. I was all alone, just me and this stone that must have felt the tired hands of thousands of thru-hikers before me. I passed across an imaginary line to its other side and, just like that, I was in Canada.
I walked back over to the boundary marker to inspect it. It said “Canada” on the Canadian side, “United States” on the opposite side, and “Treaty 1925” on the border line side. The boundary marker farther from the water was similar, with a different boundary treaty date. That one was somewhat less attractive as it appeared to be made from composite materials, not from stone, and it had a slight dent in it. I wrapped my arms around the stone obelisk and let myself sink into its hard edges. I was done, and my body knew it.
In that moment, I looked out at Waterton Lake and felt an overwhelming sense of gratitude. I felt no pride, and I really didn’t even feel a sense of achievement. I simply felt grateful that I had been able to have this incredible experience. The gift of experiencing the natural world, the wild lands of the Divide, for 125 days is something I will never forget. I was also incredibly grateful that I’d had the strength to see it through, taking the good with the bad in order to experience the full expression of the journey.
Sometimes paths in life are intuitive; other times the places we arrive at make little sense. I had no idea how I ended up here, standing at the Canadian border by a lake in the middle of nowhere. I could pretend to know the origin of the spark that gave rise to this adventure, but its true genesis is buried behind the beginning of some other quest, behind the truth behind that, and so on.
Like a stream, life ultimately only flows in one direction. But one can follow the path of a stream from where it bleeds into the ocean all the way back to where it trickles out from its source. One cannot do this with life. Hike the Divide to Lemhi Pass and you will see the origin of the great Missouri River. Try to figure out how you arrived where you are today and there is no map that can guide you.
Does this then mean that we are always lost? No. It simply means that we are living. The magic of life is that we don’t know where we are going, and we don’t know how we have arrived where we are. Beginnings and endings are insignificant: it is what we do in the short thread of time between them that matters. A long hike is nothing more than a microcosm of life, a reminder to make good memories through the ups and downs, to be open to experiences, to take risks, to be afraid but not to let fear guide you.
I walked down to a pebble beach by the shore of the lake. A boat dock extended out into the water there, perhaps for a ferry of some kind. I laid my condensation-damp tent out on the pebbles to dry under the hazy sun with the help of the breeze. I walked back up to the monuments where I had set my pack and looked up in time to see Axel coming down the trail.
He had a grin on his face and marched to the monument with purpose. He looked at it, then came over to me and threw his pack down. “Wait a minute,” I said. “Don’t you want a picture with your pack?” Without hesitating he responded, “I don’t care about the pack; I carried it enough,” and walked back over to the obelisk without it. We took photos, Axel without his pack, me with mine (it kind of felt like my child, at that point). When we finished, T Dubs arrived and Axel did the honor of taking photos for him. The three of us grabbed our victory provisions and walked down to the boat dock to gaze at the lake while we ate.
I finished my huckleberry kombucha, which was quite good. Having anything bubbly on trail is always a delight. While I ate my Hostess Cupcakes, I heated water to make coffee – my last coffee packet of the trail. The three of us made chit chat. We talked about plans for getting home and listened to Axel describe his post trail travel goals around the US before heading back to France. As we sat on the dock, a Canadian tourist boat passed by. I could not hear what they were saying over the loudspeaker on the boat, but some of the passengers waived and snapped pictures of the lake.
T Dubs departed first; Axel and I were slower to leave. I collected my dry tent and we both headed back together – back through the thimble berry bushes, back across the bridges, back through the terrain that we had seen so much of, in so many forms, over the last few months. Pushing rewind never feels the same as watching in real time. I felt a bit like I was in a trance now, hiking to get somewhere, but not really hiking towards a goal.
We stopped at the edge of the lake by the ranger station. There was a pavilion there that was protected somewhat from the heightening wind, so we decided to stop there for lunch. We both knew that we would be hacking through overgrowth for quite a while until we both got to our respective destinations for the day. Axel was taking a different route out of the park via Stoney Indian Pass and Chief Mountain. I would backtrack to Fifty Mountain, then take a different trail down, then up over Flattop Mountain ridge.
We ate our lunches in the pavilion. I had an extra rice side since I had eaten at the restaurant when we arrived in Many Glacier, so I cooked and ate that. It felt like a luxury to have such a big lunch. We tossed our trash in the receptacle there – another luxury – took one last look at the lake as the wind creased its surface, and headed south.
I parted ways with Axel when we reached the junction to Stoney Indian Pass. I put my head down and continued my long, gradual uphill climb back to Fifty Mountain. I enjoyed the scenery at the top of the climb just before Fifty Mountain, but I was mostly lost in my own mind. I didn’t think about anything in particular, but I also didn’t feel fully present. I think this was partially due to the fact that I was just backtracking and didn’t really need to pay attention.
When I turned off from Fifty Mountain, I snapped back into the present. I was on a new trail, one for which I had no detailed map, and I had new scenery to look at. Unfortunately, this entire area was part of a burn zone. It wasn’t the most attractive, so I had to appreciate little things, like the abundance of fat, juicy huckleberries. I couldn’t believe there were so many huckleberries. I practiced dipping my hands down to grab them off their branches while still moving. My hands were soon purple, but they were so delicious it was hard to stop eating them.
I climbed to the top of the ridge, remembering when I booked this campsite at Two Medicine that the ranger had said “it’s all downhill from Fifty Mountain. It was not. Once I made it to the top of the ridge, however, it was mostly downhill to the campsite.
Flattop campsite was also in a burn zone and definitely the least attractive of the campsites I had stayed in. Had I known this, I probably would have booked the same route as Axel to get out of the park. Nevertheless, I didn’t really care at this point. I could still appreciate it for what, and where, it was. I arrived around 7pm and grabbed the last tent spot just past the hitching post for horse packers. I went through my usual motions of setting up my tent and gathering my food to head to the cooking area. It felt a little funny, doing this but also knowing that my thru-hike was over.
I walked down to the food area and saw the two guys from Minnesota, I had met yesterday at Sue Lake, as well as a few other section hikers. The Minnesotans peppered me with a million questions while I cooked and ate my dinner. My little camp stove finally died, stripped and unable to grasp the fuel canister threads. One of the Minnesotans was nice enough to let me use his Jetboil stove. I boiled water with it and then poured it into my pot over my rice and let it sit to cook. If I had been in this campsite on my own, or with hikers who did not cook, I would have just gone to bed a bit hungry.
I struggled to eat as the group of guys kept me talking by continuing to ask questions. When it got dark, however, they headed to bed and I was left alone to finish my meal. I wrapped up in the dark, walked down to the little stream to grab some water, hung my food bag, and headed back to my tent. I enjoyed that short amount of time of quiet there at camp. The stars were largely blocked by the growing clouds in the sky, but there was a stillness that went uninterrupted. It allowed me to breathe, to relax and blend in with the night.
I walked back to my tent, looking off into the distance in the night. Though it was dark, I could see decently as the burn zone had no forest cover. The erect bodies of sparse, dead trees loomed black against the backdrop of dirt and sky. I crawled inside my mobile home and organized myself for the morning to come. That’s all I had left – one morning of hiking. After that, I would be on a series of buses, a train, and a plane, and then back to Wilmington.
I made my notes for the day, fighting the inevitable weight of sleep. I listened quietly to the sound of the trail around me, to soak it in one last night. It was there, waiting for me, and I fell into a peaceful sleep as it lapped into me like gentle waves on the shore. It was the same sound of silence I had heard on so many nights. It was an absence so deep that it carried presence and meaning. It was the essence of life that cannot be seen or heard but is always hovering somewhere out there waiting to be quietly discovered.
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