Looking at air quality maps, we decided that we would head down into Utah to hopefully see the sun again and get into air that made us actually want to be active again. We made it down to McCammon Idaho and found our first BLM land to camp on. We had watched the landscape change as we headed south and found ourselves in a lovely area – rocky with scraggly trees in a valley surrounded by small mountains where the trees were starting to change color. We saw a real sunset again and looked forward to moving our bodies again.
I had been in touch with a high school friend who lived near Pocatello to get some ideas of things to do in lower Idaho and Colleen shared a bunch of ideas. When I let her know we were very near her home, we decided to meet up the next day. We had a long lunch with her whole family and caught up on a lot! I hadn’t seen Colleen or her husband Mike (yes, another Mike) in many, many years and it was nice to see her kids in person when I had watched them grow up on Facebook over the years.
We met at the local ski hill where their family spends a lot of time in the winter. After a nice long catch-up, Mike and I decided to just hike up the Snow Cat trail up the mountain. Colleen and Mike had said that there was a great view over to the other side at the ridge top, so we went for it.
Backing up a bit: When we headed out on our trip, a big part of our planning was trying to figure out how much we really had to bring with us and what we could leave behind. Mike and I had both bought hiking boots years ago, but never really even broke them in. We had trail shoes that we loved and didn’t really feel the need to boot up in our past life. In an effort to save space, we decided to only bring our trail shoes. However, backpacking in the Jewel Basin had both of us rethinking that decision. Mike managed to injure two two nails to the point where it looked like he would lose them and I had sore feet and thought my more supportive boots might help. So we asked our lovely house renter Abby to dig through our stuff back in Madison and send our boots to Missoula.
Back to the mountain: Mike and I decided it was a good day to lace up our boots and try them out, which may have been the wrong decision. Yes, we wanted the boots for hiking on steeper trails, but we hadn’t broken them in yet. And we were both feeling a little slow because of our week of laziness because of the smoke. We made it to the end of the trail (at the top of the ski runs) but didn’t actually make it to the ridge. We were both having some feet issues and thought the added scramble up the rocky peak wouldn’t do us any favors. We enjoyed the views, the sun and the breeze though, and the way down was a lot quicker than the way up!
