On March 18, the 56-year-old walked into the Bitterroot Mountains up Blodgett Canyon near Hamilton. His plan was to complete a 125-mile crisscross of the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness.
On Wednesday, he walked out of the mountains near the Lochsa Lodge in Idaho and called his wife Carleen, who'd been home in Helena fretting about him for the past 16 days.
Truth be told, her husband was pretty happy to be making the call.
“There's one sentence that puts this trip in context with all my other travels,” he said. “And that's this: This was the hardest ever. Not the most dangerous, but the hardest, day after day.”
For several reasons, Layne didn't reach his objective. He was waylaid by relentless snow, biting cold and a broken strap on his old snowshoes.
His tent wasn't the most pleasant place to be, either, but that discomfort wouldn't have turned him back absent the other problems.
“There were times when, even with the stove, I couldn't get the temperature in there above zero,” he said. “That just won't do.”
Layne's plan was to walk into the Bitterroots at Blodgett, make his way west and a bit north to Elk Summit, where he'd pick up a supply cache, then turn south. From Elk Summit, he'd planned to move into the Moose Creek drainage and wend his way over dozens of miles to Paradise, an outpost on the Selway River, where another supply cache awaited him.
From there, he planned to make his way to the West Fork Ranger Station west of Sula. The whole trip, he figured, would take about three weeks.
His doubts about his plan began fairly early, as storm after storm deluged him with snow. By the fifth day, when he finally reached Blodgett Pass, he'd broken a strap on one of his Atlas snowshoes.
“I knew that if I couldn't fix that problem by Elk Summit, that the trip wouldn't be doable,” Layne said. “Even with the shoes working, it was tough going, so there was no chance if I couldn't fix it.”
Richard Layne is an experienced backcountry hiker. He's spent weeks at a time in Glacier National Park and the Pintlars in the winter, and has hiked thousands of miles in the mountains.
So when he finally struggled into Elk Summit and couldn't fix his snowshoe, he knew well enough that he was done.
“If I had turned south instead of north, I wouldn't have made it,” he said. “It's that simple.”
Her husband may have some curious ideas about what constitutes a good time, but Carleen Layne knows this much - he doesn't want to die.
“That's not why he's doing this trip and all the others,” she said. “He loves it, and he feels like he has to do it. I don't understand it, but I respect it.”
Richard Layne is, by trade, a cleaner of carpets, but he also has a photography business and hopes to sell stories of his travels to magazines. That's part of why he keeps pushing his middle-aged body to the limit. But it's not the only reason.
“I like the challenge of doing the thing alone,” he said. “I like knowing that I have only myself to rely on.”
That strategy made things tough in the Selway. For all but a few days, Layne found himself putting down his pack and walking ahead for 30 minutes to pound the powdery snow into a passable trail. Then he went back, picked up his pack and walked the same distance again.
“Basically, I was tripling the mileage because I couldn't set trail with a 95-pound pack,” he said.
That drill grew extremely wearying near Blodgett Pass, where it took him hours to move relatively short distances.
“It was grueling with the snow, and that's something I knew but had hoped against,” he said.
Still, Layne wants to finish the trip. But he's likely going to have to wait on the weather for a while. He wants someone to take him into Elk Summit, which is still problematic, and heavy snows have continued in the backcountry since he came out.
“I am going out there again, though, and I am going to finish this trip,” he said.
Reporter Michael Moore can be reached at 523-5252 or at mmoore@missoulian.com.
Wild on the Web
To learn more about Richard Layne's backcountry travels, go to www.richardlaynephoto.com.
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