The place we were going has many names. It’s MOHAB, or Montana Outdoor High Adventure Base, or the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Ranch, or the Boone and Crocket Club, or the Rasmuson Wildlife Conservation Center. A little confusing, but it’s all those things. See, Teddy Roosevelt founded this club, called the Boone and Crocket Club. The club was responsible for lobbying congress to establish among other things, Yellowstone National Park, and both the National Park Service and the National Forest Service. In recent years they bought this huge ranch near the Bob Marshall Wilderness area to study methods of ranching being able to co-exist next to a wildlife so that the natural resources can be conserved. They built this educational center that doubles as a retreat for wealthy benefactors, and they opened it up to the Boy Scouts in the summers to run a high adventure program called MOHAB.
What all that means is that the facility is awesome to cater to those benefactors. It’s the nicest Boy Scout facility I have ever seen. The front door actually has a sign asking everyone to take their shoes off when they enter. The floors are amazing finished hardwood, and the building is really nice.
Exterior:
And the lounge chairs by the picture windows looking out at the mountains.
Our first full day there, there was lots of preparation. Route planning, and dehydrated backpacking meal preparation and packaging. They took us on a steady paced shake down hike with our full packs. It was standard fare for our group, because we had been doing a lot of training, but the other crew there from Georgia was complaining the entire hike. Fortunately, we were going in different directions on our treks.
The next day we drove 2 hours on mostly gravel roads to get to the Benchmark trail head along the Continental Divide Trail. The boys wanted to see two features along this one segment of the CDT, so we wound up on the CDT for most of our adventure. This is the view from the trail bridge a few hundred meters from the trail head.
