Helena, Continental Divide

I let my backpack down with a thump as I arrived at the small family-run hotel in which I planned to stay for a couple of days, intending to rest and take in the local life in Helena, Montana’s capital city. The place is small, but it seems overwhelmingly urban after spending so long on my own in the wilderness. Often full of other CDT hikers, it's a popular stop, and the coffee shops and bars are crowded with eager hikers sharing stories of the trail.

I spent my time here wandering around the frontier-era houses and drinking lots of coffee and hot chocolate. Relaxing in a big soft armchair, I read Ernest Hemingway’s short story The Last Good Country, where the main character, Nick Adams, wanted by the police, escapes into the wilderness of the American West, surviving up in the pristine mountains, away from civilisation. The story has brilliant imagery of Montana’s wilderness, perfectly capturing the terrain along the CDT.

Montana has always attracted the rugged, the self-reliant and the adventurous, and the mountains around here were a favourite place of Hemingway’s, who, as perhaps the most rugged, self-reliant and adventurous man of the 20th Century, suited them perfectly.  He spent the last two years of his life here, in the town of Ketchum, where he is buried. He quickly made himself part of the furniture in the local bars and saloons. Still, today, many of the establishments in town have his little corner reserved where he used to sit, drinking his daiquiris and clacking away on his typewriter.

Hemingway lived an outrageously full life; he hunted German U-boats during the Second World War, he hung out with the leading lights of the Parisian avant-garde in Montparnasse, and he reported on some of the most dramatic events of the 20th Century. His work is a great companion along the CDT. In his characteristic prose, terse, simple and to the point, he told stories of courage and perseverance, of the indomitability of the human spirit and the true essence that comes out of oneself when facing peril. He reminds us of the dignity of struggle, and on such a long and difficult journey, his words offer encouragement to push on, to discover what lies beyond the frontier, across the plain and over the mountain.

Hemingway once said, when hunting in Montana’s wild Sawtooth wilderness, “You’d have to come from a test tube and think like a machine to not engrave all of this in your head so that you never lose it”. Over this long hike, I’ve come to share in his fierce love for the Rockies, and as I drink in the great wild yonder, I hope I, too, can hang on to the grandeur and beauty of this trail, even as I reach the end and return to my everyday life.