Sam has a nice story about eating a cheeseburger at the top of Drinking Horse Mountain, and I thought about him because I too was craving a summit cheeseburger there tonight.
Drinking Horse is one of those little places sorta off the grid that provides an experience that is short enough to make a last minute decision to go (“Hey! Let’s go to Drinking Horse!”) but longish enough to relieve the senses of the awful stimulation that has contaminated them all day.
So that’s where we took our hike tonight as a family.
For National Trails Day 2008, I taught an ultralight backpacking clinic on the shoulder of DHM to about 20 folks in Bozeman, and then we started the process of working on the trail – clearing old barbed wire fencing, cleaning up some trash, and sorting out the heres and theres of where the trail might go. Chase was with me then, and BPL helped sponsor the events that day for the GVLT who was instrumental in getting the trail done.
So it was pretty neat to hear Chase reach the top tonight and say, “Drinking Horse Mountain really means a lot to me.” And we replied, “How so?”
“Because we helped build the trail here.”
How cool is that.