Some random thoughts beneath the surface of a Continental Divide Trail thru-hike.
Southbound is the way to go
Snow being the potential show stopper, I’m aware it really depends on the year but after having hiked the trail I find it odd that Northbound is so much more popular than SoBo. The window is tight either way but my impression is that going SoBo it opens nicely in front of you as go. NoBo, you get a good slam when you reach Southern Colorado.
It seems common that northbounders end up short-cutting or flip-flopping sections. If you value a continuous trip over the actual divide trail, definitely go Southbound.
South Bound
Challenges
My main perceived challenge was down to the hiking window limit together with the trail’s length and the strict requirements that come with it all. A CDT thru is guaranteed hard work but it’s much more than just that. It means a challenge at both the macro and micro scales. You need to squeeze 3000 miles in 5 months so you need to average 20+ miles every day. That’s the hard work part but there are other not so obvious costs.
You won’t be everywhere at the ideal time, particularly if you do a continuous hike. You need to swallow this. At a smaller, local scale, there’s the stormy weather, which was common and almost daily for long periods. Keep off the exposed areas after noon, they say, but that’s hardly an option when you need to hike dawn to dusk every day. You will often find yourself climbing high or staying high while the dark clouds gather and it’s not pretty. I found this very stressful at times.
Should I stay or should I go?
Freezing mornings wouldn’t be a problem if you could stay in your bag until the sun is out. Packing up with numb fingers sucks big time. Going to sleep knowing what’ll happen wears you down in the long run.
Finding water in the dry areas was never a big issue as long as I could have up to date information. I could feel the scale of the problem when I didn’t have that information, as it happened when I took rarely visited stretches of trail in Southern New Mexico for which there were no reports, not even from previous years. This made for my hardest times of the whole trip, the only times when I felt like things could actually go very wrong.
When I saw the cows in the distance, I knew I’d find water
Island on the barren
The Divide often felt to me like an island of something in the middle of the nothing. The Divide is an upland area far from the oceans and any major weather system circulation and it’s the mountains that create their own weather. Where there are no mountains, there’s not much weather, just temp extremes that make the place a rather desolate grassland.
Beyond the mountains, just emptiness
The grasslands have their beauty and you can feel the wildness. They also feel rather overwhelming to me, probably more to Europeans in general than they can do to North Americans or Mongolians, in Europe we’re not used to the emptiness, hence the “nothing” which is of course not literally correct.
Wilderness and Emptiness1
Both features go together but they’re not the same. Coming from Europe, where you barely find either, I was quite used to the idea of wilderness from previous trips in North America but I was not so ready for the feeling of emptiness as I found it along the Divide. I found it powerful.
The CDT goes across really empty land all along, with the modest exception of Central Colorado, where the tourism/ski industry has created the conditions for human population. Anywhere else, there certainly are designated Wilderness areas but there also are huge chunks of land that are not and don’t feel like a wilderness, if only for the presence of tracks and dirt roads, yet the place is and feels empty of anything else I would associate to human presence: no villages, no buildings, no crops, no farming other than the occasional cow herd grazing on huge expanses of rather dry grassland.
There’s a track
The CDT felt empty land to me and this left a deep impression.
Fears
I can recall one meaningful fear that plagued me during my trip: being forced to quit. By “being forced” I mean some catastrophic condition or event such as major injury or illness affecting either myself or loved ones, you get the picture. It is mostly worthless to worry about things not in your control but finding the window of opportunity to hike this trail was difficult and costly so it became very precious. Which brings me to the next point…
Focus
This preciousness made me strong: I would never quit unless something really catastrophic happened. I had this very clear, no room for doubt. This greatly helps when the time comes to pose the inevitable question, what the hell am I doing here?
I always had a valid answer.
Physical vs Mental
I used to think and support the argument about they key to success in long distance hikes being more mental than physical. The CDT challenged this idea.
No athletic performance needed, you just need to walk as normal but you need to do it for like 24/7. It’s more like 12/6 if you just count the actual walking plus short stopping time but you get the pic. It’s a lot of work.
The physical part is probably most outstanding during the hike, when it actually hurts. Back in my desk, I keep thinking the key is mental in the sense that anyone that’s reasonably fit can hike the CDT if there’s a will. It’ll physically hurt at some time but you’ll get over that if there’s a will.
E-Hiking
The CDT hasn’t been my first major trail where I’ve navigated primarily on GPS but it’s still been a step beyond in the use of an electronic info base to the point that I hardly used anything else even though there’s a good array of useful information and I was carrying paper maps and guidebook pages. The navigation and the water availability reports were the two main resources I depended on. It was a recurrent thought to wonder about the pre-Smartphone days and how we even survived back then even though it was yesterday and I was there.
I vividly remember the time I left Atlantic City, WY with the prospect of a 4 day crossing of the Great Divide Basin, this huge tract of flat, dry, empty land with few reference points that you could identify on a map, criss-crossed by rough vehicle tracks that departed in all directions, a paradigm labyrinth where map & compass navigation would be tricky and the prospect of missing the right track rather hairy. I remember myself thinking what would I do if I loose my smartphone functionality and hoping that didn’t happen, particularly not in The Basin.
Flip a coin here
Many junctions were somehow marked but some weren’t. Missing the right way could have serious consequences in a place like The Basin. I could think the waymarking efforts may have been relaxed now that hikers can go satellite anytime and given the CDT is a huge, yet unfinished project where resources are never enough. I may guess though unmarked junctions have been a fact of CDT life forever and hikers would somehow manage anyway.
What E-hiking probably does for us is ease our way, make the thru-hiking experience more accessible, shifting the challenge and the focus from just getting there to getting there faster or whatever other goal hikers might have.
Thru-hiking in 2019
I had been off the thru-hiking scene for a long time, namely since 2006 when I hiked the Pacific Crest Trail. This gives me some perspective over the evolution of the game.
In 2019 I’ve seen more specialized gear, more focus on performance and a wider spectrum of thru-hiking and thru-hiker typologies. If not exactly mainstream, thru-hiking is getting somewhat common place. Above all, I’ve felt like innocence has been lost and thru-hiking is more Business-As-Usual than it used to be.
My way
The CDT is yet more an idea than an actual trail with plenty of undeveloped trail tread and lots of options along the way. There’s still an official track which I committed to take as far as possible. I eventually did with a couple of modest, short exceptions in the Waterton route and the Wind River Range. I also committed to a continuous, uninterrupted course in southbound fashion and I was lucky I didn’t find any major obstacles that would force me to wait, skip or flip-flop.
The official route, a.k.a. the Red Line, turned into a challenge of its own in Southern New Mexico with some rarely visited stretches that are particularly undeveloped or lack up to date information about water availability. It was the biggest challenge of my whole trip.
I focused on length rather than time or speed. As per my daily addition, I hiked 3044 trail miles.
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