Disorganized notes on the Continental Divide Trail, part 1: a new beginning, a good beginning

Day 00: 16 April, 0.0 miles today, 0.0 miles total, Lordsburg, NM

The TSA precheck line in Atlanta built and built and built without moving. The airport had compensated for the decreased foot traffic at 0430hrs by opening only one lane for passengers and crew members alike. It was uncomfortably muggy in the terminal, and the wait for the line to move was low-key maddening, but it was the fault of no person present that morning. Somebody in this world was to blame, to be sure, but that person was almost certainly still at home, sound asleep. Oh well; at least I got to keep my shoes on.

Still, I was better off than Sean Meadow, who had arrived at the Philly airport before 0230hrs only to discover that no one would arrive to check her backpack until 0330. So she waited, anxiously keeping an eye on the pile of human shit in the corner of the terminal someone had mysteriously draped with a single paper towel.

But she made it on time to Dallas, where we had planned to meet for our connecting flight to Tucson. My flight was already going to land later than scheduled, as weather had forced us to, in the pilot’s words, “take the long way around.” The plane was on its way out to the runway when it turned around and pulled back up to the gate. A young woman with the large wheelie bag and overstuffed knapsack (complete w/ neck pillow strapped to the top) typical of most modern air travelers disembarked. I overheard one of the flight attendants telling another “she just couldn’t be on the airplane.” Letting her off had taken a little over 20 minutes.

I made the flight to Tucson with only 4 minutes to spare. If that girl had taken any longer gathering her stuff, I’d have missed it.

The Drama in Dallas set the stage for the mad dash across Tucson we would have to make to catch our bus to Lordsburg. We had agonized for hours one exhausted night in a Silver City hotel room while we were biking across the country, looking for the flights that would accommodate Greyhound’s paltry, fixed schedule. It was several weeks later, when all non-transferable arrangements had long been made, that I received a notification that that schedule had been arbitrarily changed, and our bus would now be leaving much earlier. Meaning that if everything went well in getting to Tucson, we might still make it to the bus station in time…or we might not.

But we did. The margin was closer than either of us had been at ease with, but we made it early enough to have made all the weeks of hand-wringing over whether or not we’d make this connection seem neurotic. We were approached in the bus terminal by a young woman who took one look at our bags and recognized us as thru-hikers. “Excuse me, are you two hiking the CDT? So am I!” We’d met our first fellow-hiker, H (trail name pending), and we hadn’t ever yet made it to New Mexico. We spent a few minutes chatting about the trail (or in my case mostly nodding awkwardly because talking to strangers remains somehow more of a challenge to me than hiking to Canada), and soon it was time to board.

And so, not long after we arrived in Tucson, we were leaving it, now on a creaky, though not uncomfortable, bus, rolling down Interstate 10 past bright yellow billboard after bright yellow billboard advertising something called The Thing: MYSTERY OF THE DESERT! YOU’LL BE AMAZED! RESTROOMS! FIREWORKS! I was only a little disappointed we didn’t pull over there for a rest stop.

We made into Lordsburg in the early afternoon, and collapsed into our room at the Econolodge. Today had been exhausting, but we’d made it without incident. We are at the start before the start. In the morning we’d get up before the sunrise and meet our shuttle to the trailhead; for now it was time to sleep—or anyway, to try.

Day 01: 17 April, 16.7 miles today, 16.7 miles total, Big Hatchet Mountains Wilderness Study Area, NM

Easter. The vernal equinox. A celebration of rebirth and renewal…seems like a perfect metaphor for getting back on the trail after a hiatus of several years. But it also seems incredibly cheesy, as well, sooooo…no.

There’s something to it, of course. The familiar feel of a pack on my back. The crunch on the desert underfoot and the continual click of the trekking poles. The trail magic we saw today on a trail famous for having little—brightly colored plastic eggs filled with jelly beans (starburst—the good kind). I started using my trail name again, slipping into it and all the ambition and hope it carries like and old, well-worn pair of pants. I want to finish this hike; I want to be the person this name implies. At this point, I feel like the best I can do for either is hope; hope and just keep walking.

So we started our hike from the border, after having first stuck one foot through the rotted barbed-wire fence separating Mexico from the US. After as much fanfare as can be mustered by a group of 12, the 10 hikers left the shuttle drivers behind and started plodding across the sand and stone of this wide-open, beautiful, and broiling countryside.

There’s a kind of nihilism inherent to the desert, which I learned early on on the PCT. I started that trail under and umbrella of troubles, but quickly figured out that under the relentless desert sun nothing matters: nothing but water and shade. Sean Meadow and I are back in that stark emotional ecosystem. I ran out of water a few miles before we hit the first water cache, and all I could think about was that first long drink. There really isn’t room for anything else.

My favorite moment today was maybe 10 minutes into the hike, when Sean Meadow turned around and said “well, this is our life for the next five months.” So it is, and thank god for wretched mile of it.

Goodness gracious, but hiking is exhausting.

Day 02: 18 April, 21.8 miles today, 38.5 miles total, middle of nowhere, NM

Trail magic, for people unfamiliar with the term, refers to any act of kindness a hiker receives on trail. This could come in the form of a ride to town or back to the trail, a plate of food served up by a group of trail angels hosting a grill-out, or, in the case the well meaning baptist church group I met early on during my hike of the AT, a tiny medical kit and pocket bible. Far and away the most common form I’ve seen, however, has been the cooler full of drinks—sometimes at a road crossing, and sometimes in the middle of nowhere.

Today was brutally, relentlessly, scorchingly hot. It was cold enough at 0600 that I didn’t want to get out my sleeping bag, but by 0900 it was already uncomfortable, and by noon the heat was like a living, breathing malevolent thing. Shade was sparse, and whenever the opportunity arose to sit under a tree or even the spiderweb of shadows thrown by an overgrown shrub, Sean Meadow and the other two hikers we’d found ourself more or less keeping speed with, Caterpillar and H (trail name pending…), would already be posted up by the time I came lumbering along. They were good company; while it’s difficult to tell early in a thru-hike whom you’ll end up hiking with for hundreds or thousands of miles and whom you’ll see for a couple of days and never again, it was fun to sit joking in the shade.

It was just over 3 miles to the water tank near which we planned to end our day, when I saw a large tree around a bend in the trail. I wasn’t surprised to see the trio I’d been shadowing all day, but I was surprised to see the large cooler by the trunk of the tree, filled with ice and cold, frosty powerade. It was trail magic, for the second time in as many days. It was a truly blissful moment, and I hope that whoever brought that cooler all the way out there has some idea how much it was appreciated.

Day 03: 19 April, 18.7 miles today, 57.2 miles overall, middle of nowhere, NM

The thought occurred to me the other day that we are basically machines that convert packaged food and cached water into miles. I still can’t decide if that’s bleak or not.

This morning was absolutely beautiful. Some clouds had rolled in overnight to the east, and they not only made the sunrise really pop, but helped keep the temperature bearable as we got started. Even by midday, as the day’s heat peaked it never came close to yesterday’s travesty. It made it a great deal easier to enjoy the undulating hillside and the gradual thinning of the verdant shrubbery as it gave way to rockier, sandier landscape.

We ran into locally famous trail angel Radar as he was restocking the day’s first water cache. He’s an interesting fellow, committed to helping the CDT hiking community with almost no interest in hiking the whole thing himself—though looking forward to his fifth thru-hike of the AT. I liked him quite a bit.

The walk from there to the water tank where we plopped our selves in the shade for midday break wasn’t all that bad—it was hot by the time we got there, but still nothing like the day before. My right foot started to bother me in way reminiscent of my injury on the PCT, which was baffling and worrying at the same time. I had done a reasonable amount of backpacking since that foot had healed, and hadn’t felt any pangs that might suggest the injury was simply waiting dormant. One thru-hike with a fucked-up foot was plenty; I wasn’t keen on doing another.

We’d lost track of Caterillar at yesterday’s trail magic, and were just starting to give up hope of seeing him today when he appeared, climbed to the top of the water tank and started showering water over his head. Inspired but uninterested in climbing up a 12’ tank, Sean Meadow and I went to cool down using water from a makeshift trough made out of an old tractor tire. We encouraged Caterpillar to catch up to us at camp, but left doubtful we’d see him again that day.

We crossed what I assume must be private ranch land, as we had to climb over a barbed wire fence to do it. It was odd, as there were trail markers all the way through that section—in fact the fence was only made passable on the southern side because the barbed wire was being held down by a trail marker that appeared as if it had been knocked over intentionally by a frustrated hiker.

My foot didn’t bother me the rest of the day—at least not in the worrisome way it had before lunch. By the time we hit the next water cache my dogs were barking, and we all felt like it was time to call it a day. We’d been buffeted by wind ever since we left the tank, and it wasn’t likely to let up during the night, so Sean Meadow and I ended our two-night cowboy camping streak and pitched the tent. After some chit chat with a section-hiker (the first we’d met out here), we got ready for bed. Then I sat on the steel box holding the jugs of water and watched the sun set in spectacular fashion, in a silence broken only by the hush of the wind and the sound of birds in the distance.

Day 04: 20 April, 19.7 miles today, 76.9 miles total, middle of nowhere, NM

We left camp right as the sun was cresting the mountains to the east. Our section-hiker friend was still in his tent, presumably asleep. He’d clearly been long enamored by thru-hiking—when we’d hung out with us in the shade by a water tank at midday he had quoted at length from Wild and A Walk in the Woods—but his apparent lack of desert wherewithal was a bit concerning. As much Sean Meadow and I both appreciate the beauty of the early morning, we’d still both have been asleep if we hadn’t been trying to cover as much ground as we could before the day heated up. However much they may party and sleep in while in town, walking during the cooler parts of the day in the desert is an opportunity few thru-hikers waste.

After several nights in a row of bad sleep, I had entered what I was thinking to myself as “the idiot zone,” wherein making sense of the world around me was becoming increasingly difficult. It was bad luck, then, that we’d reached a section of trail where the CDT was more suggestion than pathway. I pulled ahead of Sean Meadow and H (trail name still pending) without knowing it, as they followed the line of a barbed wire fence. The trail in this area crosses a number of such fences, often without any indication as to how to do so. They found me as I was tracing a line back back to the CDT, having wandered off in the wrong direction yet again. Not that they fared much better: the rest of the morning was spent keeping an eye on the two women’s bright shirts, and adjusting course when I saw them turn around to make a correction.

The CDT has largely managed to avoid the massive increase in the general public’s interest in thru-hiking. While the number of hopefuls starting the PCT has soared in recent years to comparable numbers to those of the AT, the Continental Divide Trail has held steady about 10% of either—though that ~300 figure is still an overall doubling of the foot traffic the trail had seen the decade before. Whether due to the fact that many potential hikers had had to put plans on hold in the first year or two of the pandemic (such as my plans for a 2020 thru-hike), or some other inscrutable factor, 2022 was faced with a population explosion, with over 600 people starting a Northbound hike.

A hiker class of that size was absolutely unheard of on the CDT, and the resources available were not always able to keep up with the increase in demand. A lot of people were unable to book rides to the southern terminus, and a result a lot of them had started booking rides FROM the monument at the Mexican border back to Lordsburg. They would start their NOBO (i.e, Northbound) thru-hikes by walking SOBO (i.e, Southbound) and then hike north after they got their ride back to Lordsburg.

This is how we started meeting a steady stream of SOBOs on day 4 of our own NOBO hike. It was fun, as even with the surge in hiking population there were still relatively few of us out here. But it was also confusing, as most NOBO hikers can usually count on not seeing thru-hikers coming the other way until July or August. It was a weird blip at the start of what would undoubtedly be a weird season for the CDT.

After a healthy siesta beneath a rare stand of trees in a dry wash abutting a rancher’s water tank, we pushed on the last water cache before Lordsburg…but somewhat miscalculated the distance. It didn’t really matter in that this would have been our goal in any case, but it did mean I carried out less water than I needed, making the last few miles a parched slog—though we were treated to a nearly 360° view of Pyramid Peak. We got to the cache an hour before sunset, ready to eat dinner, get some rest, and hike into town the next day, our first stretch of the CDT behind us.

Day 05: 21 April, 6.6 miles today, 83.5 miles total, Lordsburg, NM

We were headed into town. After four and a half days trodding through the dust and the rocks and the scrub, sometimes into the wind and sometimes not, but always under the sledgehammer of the southern New Mexican sun, we were headed into town. My lips were more chapped than they’d ever been, my face burned despite my rarely ever directly exposing it to the sun, my legs were caked down to my sock-line in dirt that had somehow made it through my pants, my shirt stained with salt leftover from days of sweating, and we were heading into town.

Town, as a concept, holds an almost mythical place in the thru-hiker’s mind. My Italian friend from the PCT put it best, I think, if somewhat coarsely: “It is like going to town is a basic need of my body. Like the way I say ‘I have to shit.’ Well, right now I need to town.” Everyday we get to see views few others ever have the privilege to see; we spend our days hiking through scenery both spectacular and rare—but at night, we dream of going to town. There will be fresh food, a hot shower, and a soft bed. Town is a magic place, even when that town is Lordsburg, NM.

“Sketchy” was my first impression of the place when Sean Meadow and I rode our bikes there in February, and our return there to catch our shuttle to the southern terminus did nothing to change that impression. Nonetheless, it was an outpost of civilization, with a McDonalds, a Dollar General, and, like, everything.

We’d set ourselves up the day before to take a nearo today. If a zero day is one during which we would hike, well, zero miles, a nearo would be one during which we would hike nearly zero. It’s a vague term the precise definition of which is controversial, but hiking 6.6 gentle downhill miles to hit McDonald’s in time for breakfast counts. Sean Meadow, H (trail name pending), and I would nearo into Lordsburg in the morning, spend the day taking care of various town chores and resting, then hike out the day after. Caterpillar and the rest of the group he’d fallen in with would come in later that morning after hiking 15 miles and zero here the following day. That meant that wouldn’t see them when we got back on trail, but in all likelihood they would still meet up with us when we took a zero later in Silver City.

It was good to be in town, even for a night. Before we knew it, we’d be sleeping once more under the stars—tonight, though, we’d go out, clean and laundered, to stuff ourselves full of burritos alongside the friends we’d made under the protective shadow of the occasional tree, after which we’d curl up in our clean bed. The trail would be waiting to meet us in the morning.