Trek America - Week 1

After almost a week in sunny Seattle I had a cheerful 5am wake up to join my Trek America tour. This 14 day camping safari winds inland, via a bunch of national parks, before heading back out to the coast at San Francisco.

3 Aussies, 6 Poms and a couple of Germans on a small bus sounds like the start of a bad joke but so far everyone has gotten on really well. Our fearless leader Jen, has done a great job of organising everything, and although the camping lifestye is starting to wear a little thin, I'm coping better than I predicted.

The trip started poorly for me health wise with a projectile vomitting incident putting me out of commission for the first couple of days. By day 3 we'd reached Glacier national park, up near the Canadian border and i'd recovered enough to get out for a short but beautiful hike.

Next stop was Yellowstone NP, the first ever created, which is most famous for it's geothermal features. Geothermal features are rubbish. They smell bad and for the most part aren't very exciting. It's a very beautiful area in spite of them.

We spent the first day driving past some of the tourist sites, camped just outside the park border and then headed back in the morning for an awesome full day hike.

Six of us headed off on the 12 mile hike. It snowed steadily for the whole 7 hours and as we approached the 3200m summit the snow was a couple of feet deep. At this point the temperature was probably down around -12C. Given the trail was well covered by snow we were relying on orange trail markers attached to trees every 100 meters or so. It got a bit hairy a few times when we lost the trail and ended up crawling along in thick snow a couple of feet away from a very significant cliff. At one point a dribble of snot actually froze solid under my nose. I don't think hiking gets any better than that. Note that i did the whole hike in shorts and running shoes. What a man.

The pre-summer weather up in the mountains isn't exactly an improvement on an Australian winter. So far it's been unseasonally cold, rarely reaching 10 degrees. At night it's often 5 below. Not ideal camping weather but I was wise enough to pick up a bunch of camping equipment and warm clothes from the world's biggest outdoor store ("REI" in Seattle has 4 huge floors of awesomeness). Once i'm all rugged up things aren't so bad.

The weather was much better yesterday at Grand Teton NP although everyone was too tired to do much hiking. Everyone except me that is! By myself I managed to fast hike another 12 miles or so around a lake and then into a valley with some amazing views. Squirrels are my new favourite animal. I also like moose.

I'll finish with one of my favourite photos from the trip so far. It's taken from a truckstop somewhere in the middle of Montana looking out into an approaching storm.

I'm off now to cook food for the whole group. Pity the poor fools, they don't know what they're in for. More posts when i make it to San Fran in a week or so - All the best!