Every year I look forward to our summer trips to Montana for caving. Daryl has been caving in Scapegoat since the early 2000s and I started caving there in 2013. There is so much cave and so many projects and it is so much fun!
This year we had a group! (All my previous trips have been just two or three of us.) We had cavers from the Northern Rocky Mountain Grotto, the Cascade Grotto, and the Cleveland Grotto (he drove all the way from Ohio for the trip!)!
I tried a new food packing technique this year, where I packaged food into different days, with items like nuts, cheese, chocolate (things we snack on often and will have multiple days) getting moved from bag to bag as the week progressed.
It was a step in the right direction of food packing, but it’s definitely still a draft of a system. Every trip we take I make note of what we eat each day – this year I took it a step further and weighed each bulk item and then weighed them again when we got home. My goal is to one day pack exactly the right amount of food for a trip.
I ordered a brand new caving suit for this trip and I opted for a two piece – the Adventure Verticale Taka Jacket and Fornocal Pant. (My other suit is a cordura Meander suit.)
I’ll write a more thorough review once I’ve used it a couple more times, but here are my first impressions after a week of caving:
+ I love how long the jacket is (it covers my butt). I never once got a dreaded gap between jacket and pants.
– My seat harness often worked its way above the belt of my pants. Once I realized what was happening, I became more aware of making sure the belt was fully above my seat harness. It wasn’t as much of a problem after I started doing this, but I definitely had to readjust my pants after getting off rope.
+ Having a jacket and pants rather than a one piece made it much easier to get my layers set underneath.
+ Because the jacket is so long, I was able to open it almost all the way, take my arms out of it and put on/take off a fleece layer, then put the jacket back on without having to take my vertical gear off to readjust or tuck it back in.
– The suit is a ripstop like material and does not breathe. All my sweat stayed trapped on the suit. It wasn’t a huge problem, as I never got cold (it’s all about the base [layers]), but it did mean when I took my fleece off and just had a tshirt on, my arms got wet from the moisture trapped on the suit.
I’m excited to go on more trips soon so I can continue this list of pros and cons (and because I can’t wait to go caving again).
When we visited Lizommy we picked a bunch of apples from their backyard. Since Liz has also been to Scapegoat, it seemed fitting to bake a pie with their apples for the Spacegoat Expedition!
We left for Missoula early Saturday morning (I believe we broke a record and were driving by 5:30am!). We stopped a couple times, but otherwise drove straight thru and made it just in time for our friends wedding! After the reception, everyone went downtown to see Leftover Salmon at the River City Roots Fest – including the bride and groom still in their wedding outfits. <3
The following morning we drove to Augusta and had lunch with Brian at the Buckhorn Bar (a must stop if you are in town), before heading to Benchmark to meet everyone at the campground.
A couple hours after we all got to camp, our packer stopped by and dropped off the panniers for us to pack up. Everyone put their personal gear being packed in in one pile and their group gear in another pile and then we Tetris’d together 70lb bags for the next couple of hours.
More on the Spacegoat Expedition soon!
Today’s adventure took place on land stolen from the Niitsítpiis-stahkoii, Salish Kootenai, and Ktunaxa.