Two Medicine: Frozen waterfalls and iceberg lakes

Two Medicine

I woke early fearing a ranger coming up trail would discover our stealth camping. We woke to clouds overhead, not the blue sky of when we slept. Still, we had to move on. We had little food and two passes between us and the hotdogs of the Two Medicine campground.

We were close to the pass, and at the top in less than an hour. The snow was firmer than the soft, good, Montana snow I’d come to love–even with my snowphobia, I was pretty sure that slipping far in this snow was near impossible. As we came down, we looked out at Glaciers and saw large footprints–a triangle with four clawed fingers. When we got to East Glacier, I looked it up. They were prints of the grey wolf!

The three miles to Atlanta Creek campground would’ve been easy if there weren’t 7 frozen waterfalls to cross. Each steep, frozen, thinly-snowed, 500 foot falling waterfall either had to be crossed along the snowy part, or gone around. We went around many, which was exhausting and time consuming, but safer than falling through. My favorite waterfall had formed a snow tunnel with which we could go through. On the way around a waterfall, we relished the last 270 calories a piece.

Soon, there was snow as far as we could see. The trail was gone, and there were a couple contenders for the desired pass. One was far on the left and the lowest to climb. Another was to the right and wasn’t an obvious saddle. The other was on the far right side of the bowl. Our map warned us that Pitamakan Pass is very close to Cutbank Pass–at Cutbank Pass leads to the alternate of the CDT which requires going along the sketchy side of Mt. Morgan to Dawson Pass. Without any desire to do another pass or go along a mountainside, I knew we had to get the right pass.

We found a lake and realized we needed to climb a hill between two lakes to get to the pass. We followed moose prints to prevent postholing near trees. As we came closer to the passes, the leftmost pass had no switchbacks. To the right was the other lake…a lake that looked more like the lake on the map than the one we had just passed. It was frozen with snow all around and we had to go to the north of the lake–the south was just ice cliffs leading straight into the florescent blue alpine water. The map showed us going to the north of a lake, and we found ourselves, looked up and saw switchbacks between a giant, steep snowbank and a glacier.

On the switchbacks, the wind was so fierce I literally was knocked down. The lakes were filled with icebergs and snow. As we neared the pass, we saw a couple signs—one to the left and one to the right of the pass. Assuming the left was Pittamakan, I opted to go around a steep snowfield rather than risk getting blown off and sliding into the frozen lake. I apologized to the alpine plants as I did it. I was greeted by a sneaky hoary marmot at the top.

The path down to Two Medicine was easy for me, though as I looked up at the pass, I had no idea how northbounders would ever be sure which way was the pass, especially in the snow.

A kind camper gave us a ride from the ranger station (1 mile walk from the CDT) to the campsite to drop off the campsite ticket, and back to the ranger site to deposit our camp fee (really, NPS? Do you have to have the hiker/biker sites be the furthest from the ranger station you possibly can???). Many hotdogs were consumed at the store that night, our day of the most epic pass so far complete.