SWITCHBACK PASS, MT
Last night Grimm joined me, HoJo, and IceMan at our campsite. We headed down to the junction between the official CDT and the Spotted Bear alternate. We all chose Spotted Bear and started down the trail. We came to a little shack that had a trail to the left, but we decided that couldn’t be our route so we continued ahead. Grimm is fast and got well ahead of us, but after about 1.5 miles we saw him coming back. The GPS app (Guthook) showed we were way off trail. We backtracked the 1.5 miles and loomed around where we thought the trail might be. It turns out on Guthook the waypoints for alternate routes is not as precise as the official CDT, so it wasn’t accurately showing it. It turned out that the shack was where the trail split off and crossed a river.
We had lunch across the river with our soaked feet and continued on. Later we completely lost the trail in a swamp and found it by just hunting around and seeing it in the distance.
We had a big climb to Dean Lake just shy of Switchback Pass where we met Grimm again. We had dinner by the beautiful lake amidst towering mountains and setup camp.