Mike Foote on the Crown Traverse: Missoula to Banff, mostly off trail

Mike Foote and Mike Wolfe decided to run from Missoula, Montana to Banff, Alberta. Not on a trail — the Crown of the Continent ecosystem covers roughly 19 million acres and the route they drew through it is off-trail for long stretches, over a great many peaks, in a season when the bears are actively feeding.

This episode is the debrief.

The questions worth asking

The interview is structured around the practical ones, which is right, because an expedition like this is 90 per cent problem-solving:

• How do you plan it? Route selection where there is no trail to select, water that has to be found rather than carried, and resupply points that are days apart.
• How do you execute it? Weather in that range is not consistent for any 24-hour period, let alone a week.
• What do you eat? The perennial answer is: not enough, and increasingly reluctantly.
• How fast were you moving? Slower than either of them would move on trail, by a margin that surprises people who think of these two as fast runners.
• What do you talk about? Days of it, two people, nobody else within a long way.
• Did you see bears? Yes.

Foote’s account is characteristically cheerful about all of it, which is either reassuring or alarming depending on how seriously you take the terrain.

Why this kind of thing matters

By 2015 the sport had a well-developed appetite for the numbered and ranked — courses, records, points, lotteries. Projects like the Crown Traverse sit outside all of that. There is no field, no result, and no way to compare it to anything. What there is instead is a line on a map that nobody had drawn before, which is the older and arguably better version of the same impulse.

The rest of the show

The episode also covers a trail running camp weekend with Team RWB, a shoe change from Hoka to Altra and why, an unresolved hydration problem the host had been having all season, and new music.