Glacier is deep

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I’ve got an important history with this place, going back into my childhood, so it was a particular pleasure to see the most remote corner with someone who had only been around a time or two.

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The secret is that on the western edges Glacier starts at 3500′, and while the corridor of sub-alpine possibility is between 6 and 8 thousand feet, it doesn’t take much for any intervening valley to dip well below the brush line.  Spaces aren’t big just due to miles, or to vertical drop, but because of how unfathomably irksome it might well be to get over there.

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That being the case, it can still be shocking just how hard and time consuming it can be to get over there.  Most of the details I laid out two years ago, and all of the time estimates, I still believe, but we did not nail all the details, which put 100 hours beyond us.  I may also revise my statement that the southern half will prove tougher than the northern, at a later date.

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Somehow it seems appropriate to leave the Glacier Divide Route unfinished, for now.

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3 responses to “Glacier is deep”

  1. […] to learn and the motivation to get out and progress could within 4-5 years do a trip like this one, as pictured above.  Anyone with a decent bike and a year or two of hard riding can go out and […]

  2. […] new High Route tent, which designer Andrew Skurka brought on our recent trip, is somewhere between the BT2 and Tensegrity.  It has a rectangular footprint which is a bit […]

  3. […] what was surely a profound backpacking trip.  (They seem to have gone through a week or two after Skurka and I, and in the opposite direction.)  On the other it captures the profundity of that remarkable […]

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