Places, facts and feelings that stand out as I look back on my trip on the Continental Divide Trail, in no particular order other than a geographical north to south, where applicable.

Glacier National Park

If you start southbound on the CDT, you begin with a shock: the most impressive and postal-worthy scenery of the whole trip, right away, straight from the trailhead. It’s vertical walls, pointy peaks, deep valleys, endless woods, lakes and waterfalls. Glaciers too.

Down from Pitamakin Pass towards Oldman Lake

Glacier NP also means a good network of trails, designated campsites that require permits, lots of backpacker traffic for CDT standards and a diminished wilderness feeling with the positive effect of providing southbounders a gradual introduction to trail life.

Bob Marshall Wilderness

Together with neighboring Scapegoat Wilderness, The Bob is probably the longest, widest stretch of wilderness along the Continental Divide. This is as close as you can get to the real wild thing and about the most remote you get on the CDT. The mountains are not as high or picture-perfect as in nearby Glacier but I would personally find more beauty in The Bob.

Bob Marshall Wilderness

The Pintlers

It’s great to find big mountains that you had never heard of. The Anaconda-Pintler Wilderness in Northern Montana was for me one of the best news on CDT mountain scenery and I had the chance to meet the elusive tamarack larch tree.

Pintler Range

The Bitteroots

I knew about The Bitterroots but I didn’t know the CDT would go through them, if only a corner of the range with high mountain scenery where the trail skirts the treeline, that magic strip where woods, rock and meadow meet.

The Bitterroots

Wind River Range

The Winds are the granite version of the paradigm mountain scene at a big scale. It takes several days to go across even if you stick to the official CDT route but if there is one alternate that you may choose that’s the Cirque of the Towers: it makes the name justice.

Wind River Range

I was in the Winds in early August, prime hiking season, and the trails were busy. I missed the solitude a bit but the place is amazingly beautiful. It reminded me a lot to the California High Sierra.

Great Divide Basin

A mostly flat, occasionally undulating, dry grassland that sits on top of the Continental Divide and takes days to traverse. It can feel boring and it probably is but it is also spectacular in its own monotony, if only for the realization that it’s possible to have wilderness without mountains. The Basin feels remote and more empty than anything else on the trail, deeply wild too despite being criss-crossed by 4WD worthy tracks. The early/late hour lights were incredible.

A.k.a. The Basin

I loved the Basin as much as I was glad to be done with it.

Collegiate Range

This is Central Colorado, where the peaks are highest and the range is widest. It is also where recreational mountaineering gets more popular than anywhere else along the CDT strip, trailheads are closer and day hikers abound while ski resorts encroach the wilderness areas. It brought mixed feelings. Then I’d climb high, see the sea of mountains and think it was still special.

The Collegiate Ranges in the background

San Juan Range

The milestone by which to measure a Southbound CDT hike and the area where the Colorado Rockies get wild again. Rough trails and ace scenery for some of the best hiking anywhere on the Divide.

San Juan Range detail

Black Range

The Black Range of New Mexico must be the less frequented area of the Continental Divide Trail, not even thru-hikers go there! Certainly not many, adding to the remoteness feeling the lack of information about such sensitive aspects as water availability or resupply options. It was a bold push for me to stick to the Divide in this area and it turned out the toughest, most rewarding stretch of the whole trip.

The Black Range, looking east from the Divide

The place is remote as heck, super beautiful despite lacking the drama of the alpine areas further north.

High Desert

Hiking through a desert wilderness is one of the most special things you can have and it’s much more than the means to an end. It was in the high desert that I long ago realized the value I find in the wildness that may be beyond the postcard-worthiness.

The High Desert

There’s desert-like environment in several areas along the CDT, most of it along the New Mexico Bootheel and the Wyoming Great Divide Basin with some other notable dry grassland environment in the northern approach to the Black Range.

Emptiness

I found the CDT more empty than wild, even though it is both. But while the wilderness feeling may be often diminished by the presence or even the use of ATV tracks as a trail, the place still feels empty. No signs of human habitation, no buildings, no crops and this goes on forever for as far as the eye can see.

Very empty

Stormy weather

I would have imagined the Divide as a dry place and I had pictured long periods of weather stability. The former turned out mostly right but not the latter. The storm patterns were almost daily for most of Montana, Wyoming and Colorado and even if, in hindsight, I can say the actual rain was not that much, the constant instability would have an important effect on the hiking, particularly when combined with exposure to the point that the stormy weather turned out one of the biggest obstacles for me. I got really angry at it sometimes but the stormy skies often made for great pics.

Storm clouds

Westerlies

There seems to be a giant fan installed west of the Divide and it’s always on. It was particularly noticeable in Wyoming and Colorado, i.e. August and September in my southbound hike. Sometimes it’d be refreshing, many times annoying, often a concern as far as camping goes even though it would tend to calm down at the end of the day. By late September in the San Juan Range, it’d be a nightmare I could not wait to get out of.

Looking west, the wind would blow across the saddle. Low profile tarp

People

It may be ironic that the people you meet are among the best things in a wilderness-oriented trip but it actually makes a lot of sense. The bond with fellow hikers is immediate, honest and solid and people tend to be at their best when humbled by the great outdoors. Town life was also nice and full of heart-warming stories. Small town America is super-interesting and the CDT takes you to places you’d have never visited.

New bunch of hikers arrives in town

Hard work

Last but not least. Most times someone asks about my trip, the first thing I mention is “hard work”. It may not be a very glamorous start to a story but it was my most recurrent on-trail thought. Thru-hiking the CDT is not technically difficult but it was damn tough work to me and I could find no way around this.

Still worth every bit.