Lakes, Mountains and Passes.
I would like to acknowledge that this hike past through the ancestral and traditional territories of Indigenous Peoples. The Blackfoot Confederacy, Tsuut’ina, Stoney (Ĩyãħé) Nakoda, Cree, Ktunaxa, and Métis who have called the Rocky Mountains home since time immemorial. I acknowledge the many Indigenous Peoples in Canada whose footsteps have marked these lands for generations and I am grateful to be a visitor in these lands.
This is Part 2 of the trips that acted as our substitution for our planned 2024 Jasper South Boundary trip that was cancelled due to the wildfires that ravaged Jasper NP in late July 2024. The preamble for this hike can be found in Part 1 which covered our trip on the Molar- Pipestone-Dolomite Pass Circuit in northern Banff NP.
Since I had just completed almost the exact same hike in the Sawback region of Banff NP with a different group not three weeks earlier I decided to call this trip Sawback 2.0. I really did not mind doing the Sawback again for two reasons. First it was a different group and slightly different itinerary, and second it was a trip I was able to book at the last minute to replace the Jasper South Boundary trip that had been planned for the better part of 7 months. I was really simply just happy to have been able to book any trip but any trip in the Sawback is a great trip.
This trip started and finished at the Mt Norquay Parking Lot and utilized the following campgrounds Mystic Valley, Luellen Lake, Bloc Lake Junction, Flint Park, and Sawback Lake. There was a very short day in the middle of the trip, just 6 km going from Bloc Lake Junction to Flint’s Park. We stopped at Flint’s Park because it was the campground reservation I could get on that day. As a plus the area around Flint’s Park is very pretty amazing making it a wonderful place to just lounge around in.
A change to the group was that Anfin decided to pass on the trip. There were a couple of different options possible but after a discussion over lunch Anfin settled on staying in town and spending time with family.
As we prepared to pack up for the hike I was dismayed to find the cheese I had packed away had gone mouldy. Luckily I was at home so there were no consequences for my cheese having gone mouldy but I was suppose to be in the middle of an 11 day hike and losing my cheese halfway through would have been a big blow to my food supply.
I had previously carried cheese on my 11 day hike of Section E of the Great Divide Trail in 2021 and had no issues. I did some research to try and discover what I did wrong and to learn how I could keep cheese from going mouldy during a week or longer hike. From what I read online the major mistake I made was that I precut all my cheese. This move by me had two unexpected consequences. First it spread any bacteria from the knife onto all the cut surfaces of the cheese increasing the risk of mould growth. Second with more cut edges there was more surface area of the cheese which also increased the chance for mould to growth to occur. Plus I handled all the cheese spreading bacteria from hands onto the cheese.
I am still extremely surprised the cheese went mouldy since the cheese had been left in the refrigerator during Part 1 of our adventures.
In my research I learned that cheese should never be stored in plastic and the best option for covering cheese is Cheese Paper. Now I have not seen Cheese Paper in grocery stores in Canada but you can also use Parchment paper which we have as I use it when drying my meals. You can loosely cover the wrapped cheese in plastic but it should not be sealed tight. One tip I am a little wary of, although I got from the Martha Stewart webpage, is that you can rub a little bit of vinegar on the cheese paper to help kill the bacteria and the vinegar will not affect the taste of the cheese.
Regardless of how you cover cheese most people do not recommend leaving it out of the refrigerator for more than a few hours. This is not ideal for backpacking trips that last for days or weeks.
The best cheeses for hiking are hard cheeses with low moisture. This includes the cheddar cheese that I took successfully on Section E. For my next trip I am going to try Pecorino Romano. Apparently pecorino romano was popular with the Roman Legions due to its long term stability. Last I checked the Romans did not have the use of refrigerators to keep their cheeses fresh. They were more like backpackers but with swords instead of hiking poles. The other cheese I am considering is Gouda. I am planning on running a little experiment before my next trip by leaving my cheese of choice out of the fridge but storing it in my back pack and monitoring how well the cheese survives.
During the trip on Molar-Pipestone-Dolomite Circuit Bent and I got into a discussion on whether coffee counted towards your daily consumption of water. Bent knew that coffee contained caffeine and like many people believed since caffeine is a diuretic that coffee must dehydrate a person. I had read but could not recall the source so I was not 100% sure that coffee is only a mild diuretic and does contribute a person’s hydration. I found a BBC article that provided some background, “Do coffee and tea really dehydrate us?”, https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20140402-are-coffee-and-tea-dehydrating. The following excerpt describes where the common understanding of coffee and its link to hydration:
Although tea and coffee contain many different substances the one on which most research focuses is caffeine. Even then there is so little research on the topic, that one of the most frequently mentioned studies was conducted way back in 1928 with a sample of just three people. The three men were studied over the course of two winters. Sometimes they were required to drink four cups of coffee a day; sometimes they drank mainly tea and at other times they abstained or drank water laced with pure caffeine. Meanwhile the volume of their urine was measured regularly. The authors concluded that if the men consumed caffeine-laced water after a two month period of abstinence from both coffee and tea, the volume of their urine increased by 50%, but when they drank coffee regularly again they became inured to its diuretic effects.
A current review of 10 studies by Dr Lawrence Armstrong of the University of Connecticut concluded that “caffeine is a mild diuretic at most, with 12 out of 15 studies showing that people urinated the same amount, regardless of whether the water they drank contained added caffeine or not.”
Searching the internet I found the following study that was very clear in their determination that there is no evidence of coffee consumption contributing to dehydration. So much so they put their conclusion right in the title. The text of their actual conclusions reads:
With acknowledgement of the study’s limitations, results suggest that coffee did not result in dehydration when provided in a moderate dose of 4 mg/kg BW caffeine in four cups per day. Thus, these data suggest that coffee, when consumed in moderation by caffeine habituated males contributes to daily fluid requirement and does not pose a detrimental effect to fluid balance.
So based on my research I will continue to count my double morning coffee which measures about 600 ml of water towards my daily intake of fluid.
Day 1 Mt Norquay Parking Lot to Mystic Valley CG
Day 2 Mystic Valley CG to Luellen Lake CG
Day 3 Luellen Lake CG to Block Lake Jnc CG
Day 4 Block Lake Jnc CG to Flint’s Park CG
Day 5 Flint’s Park CG to Sawback Lake CG
Day 6 Sawback Lake CG to Mt Norquay Parking Lot