Longstride

With my hike to Canada completed, and the CDT journey for most of the group over, it was it was time for all of us to move on.

• We got breakfast at “Waffleton”, located next door to Weiners of Waterton, which had a variety of different waffle styles and toppings. I had a berries and cream waffle, which was amazingly delicious.
• I got us a slightly late checkout since some people still needed to get showers. I also asked the motel receptionist about the best way to get to Calgary; she asked about rides for us on a town chat group, and also gave me a location to hitchhike from, on the only road out of town.
• Wild Man is going home, to Texas, via East Glacier Park, where he’d left some things. He decided to try and hitch out.
• Sprouts is going to Calgary with some friends who were picking them up in Waterton, before ultimately returning to Minnesota.
• Also going to Calgary is Stumblebee (flying home, to The Netherlands) and Fuck-It (going to a silent retreat).
• Recon, Velveeta, and I needed to return to New Mexico to complete the portion between Grants and Chama we had to skip. We discussed a few options, including renting a car and driving down, but the difficulty there was getting to Kalispell, MT (the nearest place in the US we could feasibly rent a car from).
• Velveeta decided to hitch back to East Glacier with Wild Man, get a ride to Las Vegas with Bass, and work his way back to the trail from there.
• Recon and I ultimately decided to head to Calgary also and just fly to Albuquerque.
• While we were sitting on the motel’s lawn discussing options, one of the motel employees have us all slices of tomato soup cake.
• Sprouts’s friends, Adrian, Annika, and Micha, arrived around 12:45, with space in their car for Sprouts and one other person. I went with them, while Stumblebee, Recon, and Fuck-It left to hitch to Calgary.
• The ride north to Calgary went through rolling hills and farmland, with a mountain backdrop — the Canadian Rockies — to the west.
• By the time we’d made it to Calgary, Velveeta had made it back to East Glacier.
• We went to a Shawarma restaurant to get takeout for dinner, which was quite good, and then went to a nearby park to eat and enjoy the sunset.
• While we were out, Stumblebee, Fuck-It, and Recon arrived at the motel we’d booked earlier. After they got back from dinner themselves, I headed over.
• Coordinating with Recon, I booked a flight from Calgary to Albuquerque on Monday morning.
• I finally thought to ask about Fuck-It’s missing tent stakes from a month ago. It turns out, he had found them in his tent bag. Apparently, he’d accidentally packed them away with the tent. While we were searching for his stakes on the ground, we explicitly asked him if they were packed in with his tent, and he assured us he checked and they were not, even though someone had thought they heard the stakes rattling around in the bag.

Calgary at Sunset