Bears in the Bushwhack

I was tired and frustrated. The inch-thick branches had wrapped around my legs tighter than teenagers at Inspiration Point, and I felt myself sinking into the dark underbrush.

“What are you doing?” exclaimed my boyfriend Brad, as I lay there stuck in a pose reminiscent of something seen in a Christina Aguileria video. I closed my eyes and sighed, unable to move. I needed to remind myself why I had signed up to brave this bushwhack to scramble up Mount Cleveland.

Mount Cleveland is the highest peak in the Glacier National Park – the pinnacle of the area oft referred to as the “Crown of the Continent”. The summit stands at 10,466 feet, and while it does not compare in height to other peaks in the Rockies it is by no means lacking in stature. The north face of Mt. Cleveland is largest vertical relief in the Lower 48 – dropping over 4000 feet. By comparison, the imposing face of El Cap rises 3,500 feet from the valley while the Sears Tower is a measly 1,730 feet.

No trail leads to the base of the mountain, making the journey above the tree line imposing in itself. As a result, most routes up Cleveland require a two day trip. The adventure begins pleasantly with a boat ride starting in Canada at the Waterton town site and finishing in the U.S.A. at the Goat Haunt Ranger station. Most tourists leave the shelter of the tour boat for only few minutes to snap some photos, but for prospective Cleveland summiteers the journey only begins here. From here one must gain nearly 6,000 feet of elevation to reach the top of the peak. This climb up the West Face is spread over 9 miles, but only two of those are via an established trail. Cleveland has been done in a single day on numerous occasions, but the trip is surely not for the faint-hearted.

We were attempting the peak en masse in a group of five. Jollin had organized the bulk of the logistics. Trevor had also done a significant amount of research into the peak. James seemed to prefer to rely on the guidebook and his intuition to get us up the slopes. Brad and I were somewhat last minute additions to the trip, but we were equally as excited to have a chance to bag this peak. We met in the Waterton town site on a Saturday morning, and compared the size of our packs. Brad and I had the smallest packs of all, relying on careful packing to fit everything into our thirty litre packs. James and Jollin were also carrying smaller packs in the 40 litre range, but Trevor was looming under the massive shadow cast by his 70 litre pack.

“You know we’ll be doing a significant amount of bushwhacking, right?” Brad asked.
“Yeah, but I just can never decide what to leave at home. This is an improvement over last year – trust me”. With that reassurance and Trevor’s aspiration to look like a Himalayan Sherpa, we boarded the boat and bid goodbye to Canada.

After an hour long cruise and a barrage of painfully dry jokes, we landed at Goat Haunt. Upon reading our backcountry permit, the park ranger had a few comments that would further complicate the trip:

“You folks trying to head up Cleveland?” she asked.
“Yeah, We’re trying to do the route up the West Face.” I replied.
“Ha!” she chortled, “I’ve seen the slope that the guidebook wants you to bushwhack up. It looks like torture to me – I’ve flagged that “starting point”, but I’d head up Camp Creek if I were you.”

This comment troubled me. The guidebook directed us to leave the trail before Camp Creek, and stated that we’d find an elk trail to follow that would save us hours of bushwhacking through the impenetrable bush near Camp Creek. What now?

We shouldered our packs and began our plod down the trail, chatting excitedly as we each silently stewed over which route to take. Soon we reached the nondescript creek north of Camp Creek where the guidebook suggested that we would find an elk trail to follow through the brush. Jollin and Trevor headed into the bush to try and find the elk trail while Brad, James and I stood on the trail and mulled over our reservations about the bushwhack. After what the Ranger had said, I wanted to have an evaluative look at Camp Creek. And we still hadn’t come across the flagging the ranger had put up to mark the “trail”.

“We’re going to have a look at Camp Creek. We’ll be back in a few minutes” I shouted to Jollin and Trevor. We set off down the trail, all the while looking for the ranger’s flagging tape and listening to Jollin crash through the bush in the distance. Just as we approached Camp Creek, Jollin and Trevor stumbled out of the bush behind us, red faced from both exertion and frustration.

“What the hell are you guys doing?” Jollin panted “You’re driving me crazy!” I attempted to explain that we had only wanted to have a look at Camp Creek before we made a group decision as to where to go. They felt as if we had deserted them in the bush and had decided to blaze our own trail. Apparently the ranger’s comments had not uniformly influenced our route finding choice. Trevor and Jollin were steadfastly committed to following the guidebook and the speculated waypoints they had entered in to their GPS’s. On the other hand, the remaining members of the group thought it might be wiser to use Camp Creek as a navigational handrail into the west bowl below Cleveland. Only after a few minutes of heated discussion and apologies was the decision made to try and follow the guidebook’s description.

Our initial foray into bushwhacking held some promise. After only a few minutes of stumbling through the trees we happened across a well defined trail with a large pile of elk droppings on it. Surely this was the mythical elk trial! We all rejoiced and laughed at ourselves for ever considering going up Camp Creek. But our joy was short lived, and soon the trail faded into brush. The next few hours consisted of an uphill push through near constant brush.

We were a bit nervous as we waded through seas of huckleberry bushes, and called out loudly to avoid any surprise confrontations with a grizzly bear. Bears love to gorge on these berries in the late summer months in order to fatten themselves up for winter. However, these were not the only type of feeding grounds that we were to enter during the trip.

Every summer millions of army cutworm moths migrate from the nearby prairies to feed on nectar from wildflowers found at high elevations in the Rocky Mountains. Just as we enjoy the seasonal treat of strawberries and as the moths seek out the summer nectar of wildflowers, the grizzlies love to munch on the cutworm moths. Studies have shown that grizzlies can consume up to 40,000 moths a day, providing them with nearly 20,000 calories of energy to bank for the winter months. In the dying days of summer and early fall, the moths make the journey back to their flatland homes. We could only hope that this massive migration had begun. The ranger at the trailhead mentioned to us that the record for grizzlies on Cleveland’s summit ridge stood at fourteen. I had not packed nearly that many bear bangers, but maybe Trevor had. We would put him at the front of the group.

The alder branches continued to pressure our bodies into contortionist poses as we tried to navigate through the bush. Thrashing appendages and some choice expletives were required to help me muster the will to keep pushing up the slope. The bushwhack required our full attention to avoid become irreversibly tangled, but the tension that began in our group earlier was only growing.

Jollin broke the silence: “Hey guys, I think we need to start losing elevation. We’re 200 feet above the camp area I have marked in my GPS.” I was dumbfounded. We had been working for hours to gain elevation through the bush, and now he wanted to go down to camp at a spot that he had identified as flat from looking at Google Earth. There was no way that I would be doing this bushwhack again tomorrow on our summit assault, and I was growing tired of “group meetings”. At this meeting we all took our turn outlining our individual plan for the rest of the day. By the time it was my turn to hold the talking stick, Trevor and Jollin had expressed that they wished to camp lower at the flat point on their GPS, and Brad and James wanted to push onward and out of the trees. My non-confrontational self was uneasy at being the deciding vote, but I was happy to be able to break the tie in my favour and decide to push on. A short while later we broke out of the brush and into the alpine of the West Bowl. After the tension and turmoil of our group meetings, we were fortunate to find a perfectly flat campsite in an alpine meadow next to a bubbling creek. We set our tents up in time to watch the late-day sun cast dramatic shadows on the west face of Cleveland.

I had expected the night to be chilly in the alpine, but a warm breeze blew all night. When we stumbled out of the tent at 5 AM, the stars blazed in a sky that had never been hindered by the orange fog of city lights. After breaking camp and caching our overnight gear we were on the trail. We hoped this early start would allow us to reach the summit and retrace our route through the bush in time to catch the 8PM boat back to civilization.

We scampered up a scree ramp to the right of our campsite. Brad and I grunted our way up a snow filled gully while the others followed a broad ridge around the obstacle. We rejoined paths and traversed and across a scree slope onto the west face proper. From here we picked our way through 3500 feet of rock bands. The area is infamous for its poor rock quality, and Cleveland was no exception. We were extra cautious not to launch dictionary sized rocks down on our teammates, as the definition of hurt would be seriously rewritten.

After thrashing through the bush, overcoming group tensions, and tread milling loose scree we arrived at the summit ridge. We were both fortunate and unfortunate that grizzlies were absent from this alpine perch. However, there was no shortage of signs that the powerful animals had recently visited. Giant clawed tracks traversed every snow slope on the peak, and numerous bedding areas could be seen in both the snow and the scree. Perhaps their absence is explained by the disappearance of the summer moths. We saw only one cutworm moth on the trip, and had narrowly missed both their summer stay in the Rockies and the massacre inflicted by grizzlies.

However, the summit was not devoid of the sheer terror and natural wonderment that we would have received from a grizzly bear sighting. First, we experienced the awe of the majestic peaks of Glacier and Waterton National Parks crowding the skyline around us. The truly breathtaking view was made all the better knowing that this summit was earned. We had a truly special viewpoint over an incredibley unique part of the world. Second, the heights were dizzying. I squirmed on my belly to the precipice of the north face, and saw four thousand feet air fall away from me to the valley floor. It was a terrifying void of nothingness, and my nerves were not eased by the increasing winds. We had travelled through the battlegrounds of brush and dissention. Falling rocks had been dodged and hungry bears had been avoided. But as I gazed over the edge, our conquests were forgotten in the face of nature’s power. Mother Nature wins again….

- Mt Cleveland, Glacier National Park, Montana. August 23-24, 2008, All photos available at

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