On Trail

Around 2 p.m. on Aug. 23, Jordan Cash stowed his bike at the Apgar Lookout trailhead parking lot near West Glacier and set off toward the summit at a slow run. The 22-year-old raft guide ascended through the layers of subalpine, back and forth along sweeping switchbacks, through patches of juicy huckleberries, finally reaching the lookout perched on the edge of Glacier National Park.

He stayed on top of the diminutive mountain for the rest of the afternoon, taking in the vistas of the Livingston Range, napping in a patch of sunlight for a few hours and assembling his thoughts on a mission accomplished. With these final three-and-a-half miles of trail, Cash had run all major trails in Glacier National Park — covering a total distance of around 1,145 miles — in a single season. Fifty-five days, to be exact.

“I wasn’t very emotional when I was running up Apgar, but within the first mile of starting back downhill everything I’d done over the last two months really hit me,” Cash said. “The whole run down I just knew I was heading towards a finish line, and thinking about seeing the faces of everyone who came out to support me. I was laughing and crying and ecstatic all at once when I finished.”

Cash first conceived of the “Run Glacier” project a few years ago when he first moved out to Montana for a seasonal job guiding whitewater trips with Great Northern Resort. Originally from South Carolina, Cash moved out west after his first year of college and, like many westward transplants, never really left.

During the summer guiding season, Cash spent his working days taking tourists down the Flathead River, but his off days were rather lax.

“Honestly I would spend all of my time just sitting on my phone, watching YouTube and TV shows. In essence I was watching everyone else live their life,” Cash said. “And one day my buddy came up to me and said, ‘Is that how you spend your days off?’ And I was like, ‘Damn. Yep, sure is.'”

His buddy reminded him that he lived in Montana, of all places, on the doorstep of some of the wildest and most beautiful terrain in the country. And Cash decided he needed to see some of it.

“In three years I’d done less than 50 miles of running and hiking on the trails in the park, and most of that was on the Boundary Trail since I could get there from where I lived,” he said.  “If I run a miles and a half I’m in Glacier National Park. This is a great opportunity, I’m here now, why don’t I go and do something?”

Staring at maps and casting around for a way to capitalize on his newfound motivation to explore, Cash began tracing the dotted lines that crisscross the park, swerving around the jagged peaks. He wanted to be the first person to do them all in a season.

But a quick Google search led him to Jake Bramante, who accomplished that exact feat back in 2011, covering the roughly 734 miles of official trail in around 90 days of hiking.

“So that didn’t really line out, but maybe I could be the first person to run them, and the first person to do them this fast,” he said.

Since Bramante finished his Hike 734 project, he’s compiled a list of individuals who have literally followed in his footsteps. There’s just a handful, most of them piecing together the trails in the park over multiple years, instead of cramming them into a single season.

“I’ve certainly known since I finished my project that it could be done faster,” Bramante said. “One of the cool things about the project is that people can replicate it but it becomes unique to them. One gal had been hacking away at it for years and it basically took her family doing an intervention backpacking trip for her to finish it. I thought it was fantastic that Jordan wanted to try doing it fast.”

Bramante offered some advice to Cash, as he does for all who ask how they should approach such a monumental task. One thing he knows is that the unofficial list of trails to cover has evolved over the last decade. Many smaller, unmaintained trails wouldn’t make the cut these days, while other overlooked segments should be integrated into the challenge.

“The project is really about defining what your boundaries are and testing your resolve to finish,” he said. “When I talked to Jordan for the first time I didn’t feel he had the right resolve to really go for it. But by the time I talked to him this year, he was about halfway into it and it was a completely different Jordan. I knew he was going to get it done and that’s something nobody can take away from him. That’s what’s cool about this project — it’s uniquely your project and you alone fulfilled it. You’re the one who conquered it. But, you really conquer yourself, not the park. The park is a passionate beast you’re blessed enough to journey through.”

Cash made an initial attempt at his project last summer, but “failed so bad” due to a lack of planning and a sprained ankle that took several months of rehabilitation. He spent the winter slowly working up to running more miles, working as a tree cutter in South Carolina, and crafting meticulous plans. As someone who’d just taken up running five years ago, he knew he had to approach it in a comprehensive, but safe, way.

First up, he had to define the scope of his project. He took tips from Bramante but trimmed and added to the trail list in a way that made sense to him.

“I laid that map down, and I went, pen and paper, writing down every single trail,” he said. “Then I worked on connecting them and it just evolved more and more. I can’t tell you how many iterations of the plan I had before it was finalized. It was never really finalized and it kind of fell apart once I started doing things.”

His goal was to cover as much ground as possible, with some days reaching over 40 miles. Instead of trying to balance work as a guide with his running goals, he saved up enough money to take a two-month break from the river.

Trail closures and weather dictated where and when he covered the various sections, but up until the last week of the project he was able to cross off trail miles every day. During one five-day stretch in early August, Cash covered 176 miles in daily increments of 44, 46, 18, 40 and 28 miles. It was only a closure of the Iceberg Lake-Ptarmigan Tunnel trail — the penultimate segment of trail to dispatch — due to grizzly activity that gave him a few days respite.

When he finally made the trip to Many Glacier the day before Apgar — a 30-mile loop — it was a cold, intermittently rainy day. But it was one of the best days on trail.

“I woke up at Swiftcurrent Lake to a double rainbow and then the whole day was just rainbow after rainbow after rainbow,” Cash said. “After waiting a week to do it, it was truly a great day. I ran fast, felt good and was just mesmerized the whole time.”

It wasn’t always an unbroken boulevard of rainbows, however. The journey took Cash to the most remote and rugged corners of the park. One day, running in the far northwest corner of the park, he even had a run-in with a U.S. border patrol agent on horseback when, eyes glued to a faint trail along the park’s northern boundary, he crossed through the clearcut demarcating the Canadian border without realizing what it meant.

Eventually he turned around and started heading south. Cash got within 20 feet of the U.S. border when “this Tom Hanks-looking dude on a horse rides up to me and asks what I was doing,” Cash said. “This guy was absolutely badass. He kept questioning me and I could just hear in his voice how serious it was, and his horse looked ready to trample me. He had to escort me back to the office and check me out and I think we ended up making friends, even though he threatened a few times to put holes in me.”

Beyond the physical and logistical challenges, Cash found the mental depth of the project equally demanding. Most of the project was done solo with just a few cameos by friends who joined Cash on their days off. “So much of this journey has been super internal,” he said. “There would be days where I felt my mind was totally separate from my body. I’d run 30, 40 miles and feel completely unstoppable. I realized just how much more you can do than your mind ever thinks is possible.”

That being said, four days after finishing his quest, Cash is enjoying the break from constantly pushing his body to the edge.

“I got right back into the swing of things at work, but just the fact that I’m not waking up before dawn and driving to a trailhead is such a good feeling,” he said. “I’m not sure when I’ll really be able to say I’ve fully processed what I did.”

“I remember one time I was talking to this lady on the trail and telling her what I was doing and she said ‘good luck conquering the trails in Glacier.’ Even running the trails like I did, I don’t feel like I conquered anything. I didn’t conquer any trail — on any day, in any condition, Glacier National Park is the champion. The park was just gracious enough to let me finish what I started.”

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