Breaking away

Three teenagers didn’t let a few bumps, blisters and grizzly bears detour them from the route to independence.

A few clicks on the Internet last summer had convinced St. George’s High School students Lauren Meyer, Leslie Cohen and Wyatt Orne that Glacier National Park was the ideal destination for a break from parental oversight in the weeks before their senior year.

“We wanted to do it all on our own,” Meyer recalled in a recent interview.

The expedition provided key ingredients a 17-year-old needs to move on in life, including experience in planning, teamwork and accomplishment mixed with a good dose of humility, misery and fright.

In a passage from a college entrance essay she based on the experience, Meyer wrote:

“As our enthusiasm and confidence grew, eclipsing our common sense, we planned a massive undertaking that spanned eight days, including a 400-mile road trip and 58 miles of intense backpacking through treacherous, mountainous country, entirely cut off from outside contact.”

“On the first day, I must admit, we were wondering what we got ourselves into,” she recalled in the interview, which Cohen enhanced into a delightful tag-team tell-all. (Orne was not available.)

“We’re driving into the park and we see all these cars stopped and people looking way up the mountainside at a grizzly bear near the trail to Ptarmigan Tunnel,” Meyer said.

“It was right where we were supposed to be hiking out six days later,” Cohen pointed out.

“The rangers had closed the trail,” Meyer continued. “We hoped it would be open by the time we got there, otherwise we’d have to end the trip with a 16-mile detour and hitchhike back to our car.”

“My dad had been panicky over us going into bear country,” Cohen said. “That’s the one place he intervened. He bought us bear spray. It was a really good idea.”

“Except we ended up forgetting to bring the spray along,” Meyer noted.

The park’s mandatory video orientation for backcountry travelers filled many of the gaps in the trio’s understanding of backcountry travel. The rangers stressed the importance of keeping food away from animals, but Meyer, Cohen and Orne were a step ahead on that point, having already dehydrated their own food and packed it into two bear-proof containers.

“They were heavy, so we let Wyatt carry them,” Meyer said.

“The tent, too,” said Cohen.

“By the time we got to the trailhead, we were really ready to go.”

“Full of enthusiasm.”

“Luckily, before we’d gone too far, we met a hiker who told us we were on the wrong trail.”

The first two days uphill to Poia Lake and over the rocky moonscape of Redgap Pass – totaling 12 miles and more than 3,000 feet in elevation gain with full packs – brought them down to reality.

“It was the hardest thing I’d ever done,” Cohen said. “And to top it off, we hardly got any sleep the first night.”

“It was dark and we heard something on the hill above us, so Wyatt said we should get into the tent,” Meyer said.

“We could hear it sniffing around,” Cohen said.

“That’s when we realized the tent walls didn’t offer much protection,” Meyer said. “The last thing our parents and even the park rangers said to us was, ‘Don’t get eaten by the bears.’ I knew it wasn’t good that our water pump sounded like a dying duck.”

“Wyatt couldn’t hear anything, but Lauren and I could, so we kept sending him out of the tent to look around,” Cohen said. “We did the buddy system for going to the bathroom.”

“We were thinking we wouldn’t make it out alive.”

“We were pretty much paralyzed with fear.”

“Then it came running down the hill right at our camp.”

“It wasn’t running; it was charging!”

“But it wasn’t a bear, it was a moose. We felt relieved, but later people told us a moose could be just as bad as a bear.”

Courage credits go to Cohen, who does not participate in high school athletics, for taking on the hike with two athletes who train for several sports and grueling events, such as the 400-meter run.

“It was incredibly tough on me,” she said. “I kept going by thinking about the huckleberry ice cream at Many Glacier.”

But Meyer managed to level the playing field by sprouting a crop of blisters even juicier than Cohen’s.

They both had made the rookie mistake of buying new books the week before the trip with no time to condition their feet to the new footwear.

“The boots might not have been so bad except mine were a half-size too small,” Meyer said. “I hiked a day in flip flops, and it was the best decision I made – until I broke my toe.”

“That made it easier for me to keep up with her,” Cohen said.

By day three, the teens were comfortable with their on-the-trail lifestyle, adversity and all.

“It was absolutely freezing at night, with frost in the morning, but by noon it would be hot and dusty,” Cohen said.

“We got into the routine of getting up early to start hiking so we could make our next camp before it got hot,” Meyer said.

“With our big packs, we started feeling tough when we passed dayhikers.”

“And a little smug when they’d see us soak our feet in a stream with giant blisters and medical tape all over.”

Cohen said she looked forward to afternoon breaks to enjoy her friends and some of the best natural scenery in the world. “There’s no better place to read a book,” she said.

Although their goal was to get away from it all, the trio was happy to be sharing a campsite with other backpackers at Elizabeth Lake.

“We had a little accident with the stove,” Meyer said.

“An inferno,” Cohen clarified.

“Gas leaked out, caught fire and melted the pump,” Meyer said. “But fortunately, we met Shelly and Andrew, two graduate students from Berkeley. We called them our Glacier mommy and daddy.”

“They shared their stove, otherwise we’d have had to eat crunchy rice,” Cohen said. “We’d already eaten all the gorp.”

“We’d planned our meals pretty well, but sometimes we went to bed hungry,” said Meyer, pointing out that they planned their menus from the book “Lip Smackin’ Backpackin’ ” by Christine Conners.

“It was good to have Wyatt for the times when we cooked too much food,” she said. “You don’t want to have to deal with leftovers, because of bears.”

“But Wyatt can eat and eat forever,” Cohen said.

For the record, their favorite meal was Spanish rice and beans with dried salsa.

The grizzly bear had moved on and the trail reopened by the time they’d reached the Ptarmigan Tunnel area, and the Spokane teens finished their trip on schedule and as enthusiastically as when they began.

They’d learned to rinse off sweat and trail dust in ice cold water and bear each other’s close company in the tent.

“Wyatt said deodorant was unnecessary weight,” Cohen said.

“But we’re still great friends,” Meyer said. “It was an accomplishment doing it all ourselves.”

“Even the car travel was an adventure,” Cohen said. “I’ll always remember driving up “Going to the Sun Highway listening to Modest Mouse.”

“To tell you the truth,” Meyer said, “dealing with the small problems we had was part of the fun.”