Sometimes thruhiking leads us deep into the wilderness and we measure our days by the peaks and valleys: climb 2000 feet up to the pass, then descend a thousand, then back up another 1500, and on and on like that. Those are more like normal backpacking trips with some resupply stops along the way. But on a thru-hike you sometimes have trail that kind of just serves to get you from one wilderness to another. The trail runs through places no one really sees as a destination, where the trail continuity seems almost accidental. These sections aren't exactly highlights of the trail. But if you want to hike border to border, you're going to pass through some of them.

The official CDT between Helena and Butte, MT is one of these "in-between" places. You make a sort of "J" shape around the city of Butte from northeast to southwest, crossing three different highways over the course of several days. You're always just beyond the outskirts of the city and you get frequent views down into the valley, seeing Butte and the surrounding towns from above. One night just north of Butte, we camped near some power lines and after dark we could see the lights of town down in the valley below.

The view from our tent at sunrise, just north of Butte, MT

Seeing town gives you a much clearer sense of the distance you're covering. Instead of defining the days with peaks and valleys, you define them with waypoints: road crossings, gates in fences, trailheads, landmarks, trash cans, and, of course, privies (there are some advantages to being close to town, after all). You get a very intimate understanding of how much space exists between cities, between roads, between anywhere someone might call a place.

We covered a lot of miles on forest service roads through cattle pastures like these.

We camped near Our Lady of the Rockies, a monument to women and mothers everywhere with this 90 foot tall broad glowering over the city of Butte.

Our friends, Oracle and Sarah, hiking through some recently logged forest.

Some of the trail through this section was designed for mountain bikers and impeccably maintained, in preparation for a local bike race. We met a few riders checking out the course. We also traversed some trail that seemed functionally abandoned, with fallen trees blocking the trail every hundred feet and creating a sort of trail jungle gym.

A mercifully smooth section of trail through the lodgepoles pines.

An unmerciful section of trail that has us crawling over and under giant dead trees

Through these sections, rather than admiring grand vistas, you have to appreciate what I call “small nature”: a cool tree, some wild berries, or an exceptionally nice water source.

A high quality water source, while technically a cow trough it was full of clear cold water and the piped spring was spouting clean fresh water (bottom right)

Now that's a piped spring! The water was just shooting straight out of the ground like this. Molly had to keep a tight grip on the water bottle so as not to lose it along the way.

Sarah, Jonathan, and Oracle (left to right) picking whortleberries along the trail

Molly next to an abandoned log cabin found along the way

We did find some vistas to admire, though, especially the expansive views out over the valley below. We even saw Butte's famous pit from above. (Butte's most famous landmark is a giant toxic mine pit -- in town we learned there's also a "New Pit" since there's still active mining above the town. Choices out there being actively made, folks.)

A view over Butte with The Pit visible in the background

One day, at a scenic viewpoint, we chatted with a day hiker for a while and he offered to give us a ride into town when we hit the highway. When we reached highway 15 south of Butte at the end of a 25 mile day, we waited for a while, in the hopes of getting a quick hitch in. But after a long and unsuccessful stint, we decided to give him a call. Robert picked us up, brought us to town, and even bought us dinner while we all talked about the trail. He was a retired engineer who had taken to hiking all around the area (up to 1800 miles each year, by his estimates!). We swapped hiking stories and answered questions about the CDT, then he dropped us off for a much-needed zero day in Butte.

That feeling when you're waiting at an on ramp for a hitch and there hasn't been a car in half an hour

Foreshadowing! A view toward the Pintlers

Next up: we head back into the wilderness to test ourselves in the rugged Anaconda-Pintler range.

In Between Places

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