When I married my girlfriend, now my wife of 37 years, we took our honeymoon in Montana. Not having a lot of money but wanting to have fun and be by ourselves we decided to go backpacking in the mountains of Montana. More specifically in an area north of Lincoln in the Scapegoat Mountains of the Bob Marshal wilderness.
I didn’t have a lot of money as I’ve mentioned and gas was at an outrageous price of 64.9 cents a gallon most of the way out there.
We spent our first night in La Cross, Wisconsin at a Holiday Inn overlooking the Mississippi River.
The next day I drove into Lincoln and registered our back packing trip at the Ranger Station. One of the rangers said he would be in that area to relieve the ranger manning the fire tower in that section. The ranger said bears and cats make their rounds in that area so we needed to be careful and armed and asked if we were. I replied that I had an Elmer Keith gun. He nodded his head without comment.
I also bought a map of the area to make getting back to the car a little easier. Our planned trip was to last 4-5 days, but our entire honeymoon was for a total of 3 ½ weeks.
I drove into the mountains as far as I could on Elk Creek Rd. and parked where the road ended and parked beside two pickup trucks. I hoped that no one would try to molest my car or steal anything, not that we left anything behind worth stealing, but you know how thieves are.
We set up camp no the high side of Heart Lake after a 6-7 mile hike up the mountain in a spot that looked like it was the best place for pilgrims on the hiking trail. That was as far as we could go that day. Although we both thought we were in shape, and we were, we were not used to the altitude of the mountains that made travel very slow and painstaking.
The next morning after breakfast we broke camp and headed for a smaller lake that was on the map about 3 or so miles away. I set my course in a straight line for the lake. This was a great lesson on hiking in the mountains. Lesson one; stick to the trails on the map.
We eventually made it to the duck pond as we called it was not the lake that I envisioned. It was shallow and overgrown and a home to a few ducks. We stayed the night and like the previous day we left right after breakfast for another area on the map.
After 5 days of a fun and uneventful hiking and camping trip in the mountain we became accustom to the altitude on the last day and hiked 9 miles back to the car without stopping to rest every 50 yds. I think we only stopped 4-5 times.
From there we traveled to Browning, Montana and camped in a little camp ground called Cutters Bank or something like that in Glacier National Park.
Next time I’ll tell about the rest of the honeymoon in Glacier, and Yellowstone.
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Originally Posted by TheCelt
