Day 83: 08 July, 18.4 miles today, 1224.1 miles total, Routt NF, CO
We really didn’t feel like hiking. The only reason we were up and ready to go in the morning was the fact that our friend P was our ride to the outskirts of Steamboat Springs, and he had to be at work at 0800hrs. The fact that he had been trying to convince us to stay another day notwithstanding, we didn’t want to make him late for work, so we were dutifully packed and dressed and on our way out to his pickup at 0745. The fact that he made us blueberry pancakes that morning—while easing the pain of getting out of bed—did not exactly do much to encourage any latent desire to go back to sitting in the woods, drinking carnation breakfast essentials mixed with instant coffee for “breakfast.”
P dropped us off on the side of the highway to the south of town and headed off to a nearby job site. All the information we’d heard indicated that leaving Steamboat was a difficult hitch (and as we’d later learn, Elf, Unknown, and PA had waited for a hour before anyone picked them up). It had taken us a while to get a ride into town, so we assumed it would take a while to get back out. Which is why we floored when the driver of the very first vehicle pulled over and offered us a ride.
It was an auspicious start, and the driver was a good-natured hiking enthusiast who had done the PCT in 2005, so conversation was easy, for once. We got to the trail and got back to it, finishing up the last couple miles of the roadwalk we’d abandoned the moment we came to the highway into town. We meandered through meadows and past dayhikers. After a few hours, we decided to have an early lunch at a trailhead parking lot we were about to pass. We were halfway through the meal when a fox suddenly came around a parked car, saw us, and froze.
I’d never been this close to a fox before. Every other one I’d ever encountered would already have bolted and vanished into the forest, but this one was standing 20 feet from us with the sort of surprised expression you’d expect from a college freshman who had just unexpectedly walked in on his roommate making out with someone on the couch. After several long moments, the fox quietly slunk backwards, making his way around the cars and circling behind us, though still strangely close. He even stopped again to stare balefully at us—the college freshman realizing that the person his roommate was kissing was none other than his own girlfriend—before finally trotting off into the trees and out of sight. It was bizarre behavior for a fox. I’d never seen anything like it.
The afternoon was a blur of theoretically easy hiking and obnoxious obstacles. There was mud, there were mosquitoes, and there were blowdowns seemingly every 50 yards or so. There was also an endless curtain of silk worms hanging from the trees, and try though we might to avoid them, we were soon covered head to to in silk. And worms. Every ten minutes, driven by whatever dangling instinct defines the life and motivation of a silk worm, I’d see yet another one I hadn’t realized had been crawling over my head make it to the brim of my hat and start to spin a line of silk from it.
We could have pressed on when we hit the Forest Service campground—lord knows we had plenty of daylight—but we were tired and annoyed. So we called it for the day and reveled in the unparalleled luxury of having a picnic table, even as the mosquitoes swarmed overhead and occasionally dive-bombed our ramen. The afternoon had been a cavalcade of petty annoyances, but we could hope that with a good night’s sleep the next day might be better, even if the conditions were more or less the same. We were hiking again, getting closer with each step to Wyoming, looking forward to the end of Colorado.
Day 84: 09 July, 23.8 miles today, 1247.9 miles total, Routt NF, CO
But of course, Colorado wasn’t going out without a fight. After a night of patchy, rough sleep at a for-real Forest Service campground—thanks to a group of chatty Denverites in the neighboring site and a tenaciously shitty sleep pad that couldn’t hold air for one night even after I had just repaired it in Steamboat—I had groggily gotten up early to get a jump-start on the day, only to spill boiling water all over my hands while desperately swatting at the cloud of mosquitoes that had descended on me all at once as I was trying to make breakfast. The rest of the morning was spent slowly navigating a series of alpine meadows that were covered in either snow, swamp, rocks, or any sad combination thereof. The mountains were, as always, beautiful, but I was too busy trying not to loose a shoe in the dense mud to notice.
The highlight of the day was when I’d been driven to take a short break to eat a few handful of crackers and briefly experience the world without a pack on my back. I caught a hint of movement out of the corner of my eye and looked up to see an unknown ungulate (later tentatively identified by Sean Meadow as a prong horn antelope) staring at me from maybe 150 feet away. That made two days in a row that a wild animal had gotten weirdly close to me and then just sorta glared at me. Thrilling as it was, I could only hope the trend wouldn’t continue as we got into grizzly territory.
The afternoon was a blur of mud, rocks, and a long, uneven descent toward a valley floor—the latter of which we were criticized for by a day-hiker who couldn’t be bothered to leash or in anyway control his unruly dogs while he dressed down any Continental Divide Trail hikers who had had the gall to leave the continental divide. Like we weren’t allowed to go below 12000’ ever. “Man, we just go where the trail says,” we each explained when we met him; and answer that failed to satisfy him, but at least let us get on with hiking.
We came to another Forest Service campground, and called it for the day. We were still 3 miles short of our initial goal, but Elf and I were both fairly worn out and ready to be done. We traveled an odd series of dirt driveways and passed a confusing collection of contradicting signage before walking into what looked like an abandoned campground. A man and a woman stood by a picnic table, but quickly left when they saw us walk up. We selected our individual campsites and we’re about to put our tents up when the man came back and explained that this was a group campsite, which he and his wife had reserved for $100. But once they’d gotten there, they couldn’t find any spots flat enough that sleeping on them wouldn’t aggravate his wife’s temperamental neck, so they were going to go to a hotel, instead. He then asked if he could take pictures of our tents pitched in the group site so he could show them later to someone at the Forest Service and attempt to get his money back by claiming that the site had already been occupied. Honestly, none of what he said made any sense, but the short of it was we could camp there if he could photograph our tents. We agreed on the proviso that we not appear in any of the pictures.
At that point, the man became very chatty, asking us about our experience of the CDT, and talking with excitement about the sections of trail we had to look forward to as we made it farther north. It was becoming increasingly clear that this guy was something of an outdoors enthusiast—and possibly aspiring thru-hiker—and his spouse was not. There are ways to accommodate differences like that in a marriage, but it didn’t appear as if he’d figured them out yet.
On the way back to his SUV, he asked if we needed anything at all, since he and his wife we were fully stocked for a night of camping they weren’t actually following through with. It was PA, with his characteristic ease in talking to anyone, who piped up, “we don’t need anything, but if you have any sodas you’d be willing to share, we’d certainly appreciate it.” “Those are my wife’s. Let me ask her if that would be okay.” With that, he disappeared up the short trail to his waiting vehicle.
We never saw him again.
Day 85: 10 July, 27.7 miles today, 1275.6 miles total, Medicine Bow NF, WY
Unknown had a gait like a leopard or an antelope: any animal uncannily thin and fast. I would see him go charging up a mountain and give my internal shoulders a shrug. I could never move that fast; might as well wish for an eagle’s wings as try to keep pace with him.
PA, on the other hand, moved like a man taking an idle walk in the park on a Sunday afternoon. He strolled down the trail; he just did so very, very quickly. He made it look achievable. He made it look easy. He was always the last out of camp, knowing that he would effortlessly catch up to anyone ahead of him. Sometimes when I would get started in the morning he’d still be in his tent.
When Sean Meadow, Elf, and I had our shelters packed away and were working on breakfast, PA stuck his head out of his tent. “Did you guys get a bunch of condensation last night?” he asked, and we replied that we had. Our tents—as well as every surface in the entire campground—were soaking wet with dew. “One last ‘fuck you’ from Colorado,” he said, ducking back inside as the rest of us got ready to walk.
It wasn’t the last. We had 21 miles to the CO/WY border, and almost all of it was on a rocky, exposed dirt road. Though we’d been able to see our breath in camp, it was already warm by 0700hrs. By late morning, the heat in the direct sun was a burden. The road was a real piece of work, dropping sharply down for a few hundred feet before rising painfully steep into the sky. It was like New Mexico with a maddening cycle of near-vertical ups and downs. It sucked.
In the afternoon we started seeing a parade of dirt bikes and ATVs for which we’d have to clear out of the way. And while I still basically despised them, it was hard to feel self-righteous about their presence on a road. Roads are where vehicles belong, after all, that was kinda my whole argument against Colorado’s enthusiasm for welcoming them onto its backcountry trails. It wasn’t really their fault that some route planner had plopped the CDT onto their road…but that didn’t make them any more fun to be around.
This lasted until 1/4 mile before the Wyoming border, at which point the trail finally veered off the road and onto a dirt footpath. The four of us met at the border to celebrate another milestone: one more state completed. But we were all exhausted, and so our enthusiasm, though genuine, was subdued. We still had several more miles to go before we could call it a day—we needed to get into town the next day before the post office closed, and to ensure that we needed to cover as much of the distance as we could beforehand. We did what we could and ate a hot but perfunctory dinner before collapsing into our tents, just in time to be sheltered from the first real rain of Wyoming.
Day 86: 11 July, 13.7 miles today, 1289.3 miles total, Riverside, WY
As we’d crossed the state line the afternoon before, PA casually looked around and said, “Wyoming. Let’s see how it welcomes us.” We only pushed on a couple of hours after that, so we didn’t really have a very well developed picture of that greeting. It sprinkled on us a couple of times, despite a forecast of clear and empty skies, but the trail seemed fairly well maintained and before long I was lying on my leaky, half-deflated air pad.
We got up in the morning with the enthusiastic energy of a day in town. We’d have to hike 14 miles first, but visions of eating lunch in a rustic small town restaurant fired our ambition, and we were ready to tackle those miles as quickly as humanly possible. We were doing pretty well, too, until we hit the 8.5 mile mark. “As quickly as humanly possible,” it turns out, is not very quick when it involves crossing about four miles of bog swamp nastiness.
The thing about hiking across bogs is: it is fucking awful. When crossing a river or stream, you can try to keep your feet dry, but the moment one of them gets wet you get to shrug your shoulders and simply charge into the water. The worst case has already happened and you have nothing to gain by continuing to jump from rock to rock. In a bog, though, you have to keep find the most solid footing you can, even long after your feet have inevitably become wet. Otherwise, you can easily put your foot straight into a mud hole several feet deep. You can lose a shoe like that if you’re not careful—or even if you are. I can tell you from experience that fishing for a shoe in three feet of bog swamp stink is unlikely to become the highlight of your day.
The CDT’s boggy, swampy, marshy stretches look deceptively like pleasant meadows from a distance—but by the time we’d hit Wyoming we’d learned not to trust anything that looked easy. Crossing these areas is a slow, meticulous process: often you’re just looking for the one patch of mud that is only slightly firmer than everything around it. If you’re lucky you can occasionally use your trekking poles to vault from one dryish piece of earth to another, but frequently you just have to make your best guess and step across. It gets old.
There were a pair of hikers already waiting at the road for a hitch when we got there, but there were no cars whatsoever on the highway to stop for a single plaintive thumb—let alone the six that were now in need of a ride to town. We were speculating how long we might have to wait before a car even came by—let alone picked us up—when a couple on ATVs came zooming up and started loading the vehicles onto a trailer hooked up to the one truck in the trailhead parking lot. They started chatting with PA, and before I even knew what was happening they had offered the lot of us a ride to town.
It was a shock to ride down the mountain and leave the alpine ecosystem behind. The trail we’d just left had been lush, wet, a damned swamp, but the valley below was arid, dusty, and very, very hot. It was something of a preview of what we’d encounter once we left the continental divide proper and entered the great divide basin. It was like riding into an open-air sauna. July in southern Wyoming’s lower elevations is no joke. It was going to be a sea change when we eventually had to hike our into it. From burning hard pan desert to bitingly cold alpine tundra and back again.
This was our near future: out of the freezer and into the fire.
