I’ve been vacationing in Western Montana this summer season, visiting with associates who’ve a homestead close to the Cupboard Mountains Wilderness, south of Glacial Nationwide Park. They’re a household of hardcore hikers, too, and so they’ve been taking me on their favourite hikes. It’s been a pleasant break from the humidity of New Hampshire and Vermont, with beautiful mountains, alpine lakes, and better elevations than I’ve again dwelling. There’s little doubt that I’ll go to this space once more sooner or later to climb extra mountains and fly fish in alpine lakes.
Engle Peak is a 7497-foot mountain with superior 360-degree views from the summit. Whereas it’s one of many greater peaks within the space, the trailhead for the Engle Peak Path begins at about 4800′ and climbs through switchbacks making it an affordable reasonable path to hike. Attending to the trailhead is one other story, requiring a 1 hour/7 mile drive on a rocky forest service highway that hugs the facet of the mountain with 1000’+ drop-offs alongside the passenger facet.
We used a number of sources to plan this hike, together with the Benchmark Maps Montana Highway and Recreation Atlas to seek out the trailhead. It’s invaluable for driving within the space since a lot of native roads are unpaved and sparsely signed. We additionally benefitted from the path descriptions in Trails of the Wild Cupboards (4th ed), co-authored by my associates’ mountain climbing pal Jim Mellon. GaiaGPS and Caltopo would not have full maps of this hike, so we needed to depend on Alltrails for a GPS view of the route. That was somewhat little bit of a shock, however I’m glad I downloaded a map as a result of elements of the route are obscured by excessive grass, and having a reside map for reference was useful.
This a part of Montana may be very arid, so we every carried 2 liters of water and bear spray since that is Grizzly nation. I had the foresight to put on lengthy pants on this and all my hikes on this journey to Montana for mountain climbing via overgrown vegetation and tick safety. The Hearth Hazard Stage that day was Very Excessive, which is typical of this time of yr however a marked distinction to my common haunts in New Hampshire and Vermont, the place floods are extra of a hazard than forest fires.
The Engle Peak Path begins with a steep 1500′ climb 1.5 miles out of the beginning gate as you climb as much as the ridgeline resulting in Engle Peak. The ascent is mitigated by switchbacks and a tread largely freed from roots and rocks, so we motored up the facet of the ridge, getting the toughest a part of the hike out of the way in which early.
From there, the forest opens up and is outdated by a mile or so of open grass and burnt bushes, the results of previous fires, most likely brought on by lightning hitting the height. It’s sobering stuff, but it surely’s a pure course of that happens with out human intervention.
Giant swaths of open talus quickly changed the excessive grass. At first sight, I used to be involved we’d need to traverse these areas with out path markers since this whole route was unmarked and unblazed. However a well-defined pathway of fitted stones was constructed via it that was straightforward to observe and switched again to the summit. It was a beautiful instance of utilizing native supplies to assemble a path that blends into the panorama.
We quickly arrived on the summit cairn and had a calming lunch whereas surveying the peaks and lakes surrounding it. I’ve been mesmerized by the dimensions of the mountains right here and the great thing about the alpine lakes that punctuate the valleys between them. Whereas I sit up for returning east to hike in New Hampshire and Vermont this summer season and autumn, I do know I’ll return to Montana once more.
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