Actually there is a way to do this. You use Timer0 as the primary counter, and configure timer1 to count overflow events from timer0. This effectively turns them into a 16-bit timer register. Instead of a period limit of something like 50 or 60 ms, you can measure a period up to something like 35 minutes (actual values depend on crystal frequency).
There will be a small precision problem with this unless the following is adhered to
a) do not load T0, if tou do you will get interrupt latency errors. If you need to load the primary timer (T0 above) you must use T2 which has auto reload.

Erik