Disorganized notes on the Continental Divide Trail, part 15: a land without shelter

Day 87: 12 July, 20.1 miles today, 1309.4 miles total, middle of nowhere, WY

There was a mental phenomenon I experienced on the Appalachian Trail that I came to think of as the Katahdin blues, even though I never discussed it with another soul. Basically, after crossing the trail’s midpoint, it became difficult not to fixate on the northern terminus, and more specifically, how hopelessly far away it still was. Before then, it hadn’t been an issue: Katahdin was as far away as the moon for all I cared, and little things like my daily mileage were all but irrelevant. All that mattered was that I walked. And then, halfway through, that changed.

A similar thing happened on the PCT—though the midpoint of that trail also coincided roughly with a foot injury that would dog me for the rest of that hike, so it was easy to blame a lot of the angst I felt on the physical pain I was in most days. The midpoint of the CDT is a vaguer notion than it is on the other triple-crown trails. While the CDT redline has a fixed mileage and there is certainly a specific point halfway between its ends, very few hikers follow the redline the entire way. “No two hikers hike the same CDT,” the saying goes, which makes any individual’s halfway point all but impossible to calculate before they finish.

If the “ceremonial” midpoint of the AT is Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia—still some distance from the trail actual midpoint somewhere in Pennsylvania—the CO/WY state line could be thought of as the CDT’s “de facto” midpoint. For most thru-hikers, it seems, that arbitrary line is good enough. That meant that Sean Meadow and I were only just now a little over halfway from Mexico to Canada, quickly running out of summer with a monumental distance yet remaining to the end. The Katahdin blues were calling, tempting me to give into despair, and I would go.

Very much not helping matters was the fact that, so far, Wyoming sucked. After yesterday’s boggy nightmare leading up to the conjoined towns of Encampment and Riverside, today hadn’t been much better. We hiked through exposed meadows under a burning sun, only to be occasionally granted shade by stretches of wood rife with blowdowns, silkworms, and mud. When forced by the upcoming terrain to make camp or hike several miles farther into the dusk, we ended up pitching our tent in a field with the most pernicious crowd of mosquitoes we’d yet encountered. Wyoming was off to a rough start. Not exactly the cure for the Katahdin blues I’d have hoped for.

Day 88: 13 July, 31.1 miles today, 1340.5 miles total, middle of nowhere, WY

Rattlesnake count: 3

The Great Divide Basin is the only place where the continental divide splits. While for most of its length that watershed is a single, continuous line, in southern Wyoming the Atlantic and Pacific halves diverge, leaving a giant, rectangular bowl in the middle that doesn’t drain anywhere. You’d think it would be a swamp, but it’s actually quite arid, composing a large share of Wyoming’s Red Desert. What surface water there is can be somewhat toxic, as salts and other elements leached out of the soil only become more concentrated as the water evaporates. There were reports of several hikers who blamed days’ worth of diarrhea on drinking water that they suspected had been contaminated with magnesium, even after filtering.

I had been expecting a gradual shift from mountain woodland to basin ecosystem, but once we left the edge of the forest we had camped by, that was it. No more trees, just shrubs, grass, and dust. The sun beat down relentlessly as it grew uncomfortably warm by 0700hrs. Thankfully, as the morning wore on and we passed down one dirt road and another, a cooling breeze grew up and we were not uncomfortable. It was actually fairly pleasant.

As we walked into the afternoon, we watched several storms bloom around us. We hoped we’d be lucky enough to keep dancing between them, but as we were filtering the last cleanish water we’d see for over 20 miles, a storm came rolling in right on top of us. We managed to get our packs on and get walking just before it broke, the thunder and lighting exploding right over our heads as a sheet of rain poured down over us. The thick dust that passes for topsoil in the basin became a malignant sort of mud, sticky and heavy like wet concrete. It stuck to our shoes, instantly adding 5lbs to each foot. As arduous as this made walking, there was little point in trying to scrape it off, as the next step would only ensure another coating. Besides being heavy, the mud was slick, making it feel like we were walking with blocks of butter tied to our feet. We tried singing “Singing in the Rain” in the rain, and it did seem to lift our spirits for a moment, but as the rain petered out we eventually just shuffled our mud-laden shoes in silence.

We eventually came to a flat, grassy area that was mercifully free of mosquitoes and shrubs, making camp on a dry patch from which we could see thunderstorms raging to the southeast and hear coyotes baying in the growing dusk.

Day 89: 14 July, 27.6 miles today, 1368.1 miles total, Rawlins, WY

Despite the sudden burst of rain that crashed onto the tent around midnight, our cow-hammered refuge from the dust and sagebrush shrubs of the Red Desert was dry in the morning, save for the piece of tyvek I’d left sticking half-out of the vestibule. Accidentally sitting in the small puddle of rainwater was pretty much the first thing I did that morning.

We had been on a dirt road almost all the day before, and would be again until we reached WY Hwy 17. We’d been walking under the blessedly cool cover of a thin layer of clouds for a couple of hours when we saw a car coming toward us, kicking up a huge plume of dust behind us as it went. When it reached us, it slowed to a stop and the passenger-side window rolled down. The driver asked how we were doing on water. “We’re fine,” we said. “All the water out here is alkaline,” he said, “you can’t drink it.” “We know.” “Where is your next source?” he asked. “There’s a pond by the highway that’s supposed to have good water,” we said, “about 8 miles ahead.” A dark look crossed his face. “Are you sure you don’t need water? I have plenty. It’s why I’m out here.” “No, we’re good, thanks.” With that, he wished us well, turned the car around, and drove back the way he came.

The scowl that had darkened the trail angel’s brow at the mention of our next water source nagged at me more and more as the morning went on. I stopped drinking the water I still had, thinking it might be best to start rationing it for the rest of the day. Sure enough, when we reached the source we found only a small puddle of poisoned water in the center of a small cirque of alkali-dusted mud. We did not, in fact, have enough water—and the morning clouds were burning away, letting the full weight of the desert sun beat down on our shoulders.

To be clear, we had enough water to survive the 14-mile highway walk before us without succumbing to heat exhaustion or severe dehydration. Our lives weren’t in peril, but the 5-ish hours it would take to get to town would be very, very, very uncomfortable. It was close to midday, and, water or no, this was most likely the best place we’d have to stop before getting to Rawlins. Even so, Sean Meadow declared that she was too frustrated and too hot to eat anything, shouldered her pack, and started off for town. I watched her go in amazement. I was no less upset by our shortage of water, no less uncomfortable sitting on a patch of long-dried mud under the cruel sun, but I knew I’d have a hard time continuing to walk if I didn’t get something more substantial in my tummy than the coffee and a couple pieces of jerky I’d had for breakfast hours ago. As I greedily sucked the moisture from the bottom of a packet of tuna, I watched Sean Meadow start up the highway and wondered for a while what it would feel like to be powered only by determination and fantasies of cold sodas.

The road walk was indeed extremely uncomfortable, although as the afternoon wore on a small herd of fluffy cumulus clouds gathered in the sky and provided the odd bit of shade here and there. I sipped my water as stingily as I could manage, but I was still dismayed at how quickly it was dwindling. After a monotonous couple of hours, I heard the vehicle approaching from behind me slow down. I looked up to see a van pulling level with me, with two CDT hikers beaming at me from the cab.

I hadn’t seen Bubba and Gin since they’d left Pagosa Springs to hike this exact stretch of the trail. It had been a smart move, since not only did it give the snow in the San Juans more time to melt out, but they’d tackled the Great Divide Basin when the daily high was still in the 70s. Having gone back to Wolf Creek Pass and on through the rest of Colorado, they were heading north to pick up the CDT where they’d left off. And they had water. Lots of it. They left me fully hydrated and with more than enough water to endure the remaining miles to town. It was still a long, hot, boring walk, and by the end of the day, my feet would be battered and sore in way they hadn’t been since we’d left the roads of New Mexico. But at least I wasn’t thirsty. I had everything I needed to get me to the hot shower and soft bed that lay in my immediate future. As the saying goes, the trail provides.

Day 90: 15 July, 0.0 miles today, 1368.1 miles total, Rawlins, WY

We hadn’t planned on taking a zero in Rawlins—or anywhere in Wyoming for that matter—but we’d made it to town a full day earlier than anticipated. A zero was not only a nice reward for the misery of the last few days, but also gave us time to get done all of the chores we’d have to do to be fit to head back out into the desert for 120 more miles.

There is a walk characteristic of thru-hikers in town, a pained, shuffling gait otherwise seen in the elderly and the infirm. On trail, these people move across the landscape with a steady, purposeful stride; but in town, that loping glide is reduced to a “hiker hobble,” as every joint seems frozen stiff and every ache is amplified. On trail, the continual movement no doubt helps keep the muscles and joints loose and warm—and the intense drive to make the day’s miles motivates them to push through the pain. On a rest day, however, it seems hard for three seasoned walkers to move at all. Indeed, no one will take a single step further than is absolutely required. A hiker taking a zero will gladly settle for any cheap piece of crap if it means avoiding the walk across town to where the good restaurant is.

We went to Walmart to resupply in the morning and didn’t leave the room again except to meet up with PA, Elf, Unknown, and Shorty—whom we hadn’t seen since his side-trip to Durango for a tinder date—for dinner. As it was, the 0.3 miles to the diner was a big ask, but we hadn’t seen Shorty in a month, so it seemed worth it. The diner was staffed by a single woman who flatly informed us that 6 customers would be too many, and turned us away. We ended up walking back to the Econolodge, which had a restaurant of sorts downstairs. The place had the vibe of a spaghetti fundraiser in a church basement, but the spaghetti was at least decent. It was a fair setting for a family reunion, at any rate. Shorty would be zeroing the following day as we got back to the trail, so in the meantime we’d have to take what we could get.

Day 91: 16 July, 28.1 miles today, 1396.2 miles total, middle of nowhere, WY

Desert hiking is unusually tedious. I think it’s due to the lack of trees or mountains or anything to obstruct your view for miles and miles and miles in every direction. It’s a fun novelty at first, but you realize quickly that an unobstructed view changes little as you walk. Everything still looks the same an hour later as it did when you started. You don’t feel like you’re making any progress, and the whole thing is just really damned boring. This is where audiobooks turn from nice little extras to necessities.

For this section of trail, I chose to distract myself from the sand and wind and relentless sun and the weight of 4 liters of water on my back by immersing myself in the world of Frank Herbert’s Dune, a sci-fi story set on a desert planet where water is so scarce the natives wear “still suits” to reclaim all moisture excreted by the body. This did not really turn out to be the fanciful diversion I had hoped it would.

But it did help pass the time, as we walked for hours within earshot of a major highway, as we walked for hours along a seemingly deserted road* that was lined somehow in this arid climate with miles of stagnant pools that had bred an army of mosquitoes that could not have given one fuck less about the clouds of deet we kept spraying all over ourselves, as we walked through the open desert floor and into a nasty headwind that took real effort to walk against.

We’d entered the heart of the Great Divide Basin, an area without a single tree and with few sizable hills to hide behind. As had been suggested by some hikers who had recently come through this area, this would be a horrible place to be caught in one of the daily afternoon thunderstorms, as you were often the tallest object for miles in every direction. As it was, it was bad enough to be so far removed from anything that could possibly shelter your tender husk from the sun or the wind.

None of us was particularly keen to be back in the desert, but here we were. At least this time we had our trail legs and could move through this reprise landscape with more speed that we’d been able to muster in New Mexico. At least this time we only had to do this for a couple hundred miles. At least this time I could listen to Dune, and imagine a desert world somehow worse than the one I had intentionally walked into. At least Wyoming’s Red Desert had no giant sand worms, that I was aware of, at least.

*the deserted road walk was an alternate designed to avoid a particularly grumpy rancher through whose land the CDT passed using a public easement the man was apparently quite vocally opposed to

Day 92: 17 July, 30.4 miles today, 1426.6 miles total, absolutely nowhere, WY

After today, I’d have gladly taken a giant sand worm, or literally anything else to break up the monotony. As unknown put it: “you see the trail stretching to the horizon, so you walk for hours until you get to that horizon, and then you look over it, and it looks exactly the same.” Even the antelope, apparently driven mad by the sameness of their surroundings, spent the morning running through the sagebrush at full speed I assume just to get through this endless desert and onto a better life as quickly as possible.

The day’s hiking started quite comfortably, but that ended the moment the sun breached the low mountains to the east and reached down to slap us with an immediate wave of discomfort. There was no shade in sight, anywhere, in any direction—the closest thing to a tree for miles were the sage bushes, which seemed to max out at about 18” high, and grew more commonly between 6” to 12”. We got a brief reprieve around midday when we got to a small reservoir in the complete middle of nowhere. There still was no shade, but it was first swimmable water we’d seen since we’d entered the basin. We jumped in, still wearing shorts and shirts, which stayed damp and wonderfully cool while we ate lunch under the relentless sun. By the time we were packed up and ready to move on, however, our clothes were all totally dry.

As the day continued to heat up through the afternoon, the trail shifted from hard-packed dirt to loose, uneven sand. We paused by a piped spring only long enough to fill up water and eat a snack. We needed a break, but without shade it just wasn’t restful, so we moved on. We passed by a bag of oranges a trail angel had left by a dirt road—it was a kind thought, but by late afternoon the oranges were hot to the touch, making them even less appetizing than the water in our packs that had also grown disgustingly warm in the sun. Around mile 29, I found Sean Meadow sitting under the first tree we had seen since leaving Rawlins. We were close to finished for the day, but neither she nor I could pass up the opportunity to sit in the shade for just a few blissful minutes, letting the relatively cool air wash over us like the tide on the beach, longing for the blending of imagination and reality that would carry us, finally, out to that cold and refreshing sea.

Day 93, July 18, 30.5 miles today, 1457.1 miles total, fucking nowhere, WY

The day began promisingly enough. Hoping to make the most of the cooler part of the morning, we got up early enough to be on trail by 0510hrs—the summer dawn just barely bright enough at that hour to make out the path without a headlamp. A couple of hours later things still seemed to be going well, when I noticed I couldn’t see Sean Meadow anymore. Her pink shirt and bright orange shorts had been a beacon against the sea of dull sagebrush green, and without any trees to conceal her, her disappearance was concerning. I checked my location, and was horrified to learn that for the last 15 minutes or so, I’d been hiking due south—about a 90° angle away from the trail. Looking at the map, it seemed like my most efficient correction would be to bushwhack a mile and a half to the west and rejoin the redline there. I always hated backtracking, so without any hesitation I started stomping across the sage.

I should have backtracked. Not only is sagebrush deceptively slow and difficult to walk through, but the line is chosen took me through no fewer than a half dozen stream-cut ravines, sharp and steep and exhausting to climb down and back out, over and over. It was such a slow, frustrating process that by the time I finally made it back to the trail I had run out of things about the basin, the desert, or Wyoming to curse.

When I got to the small pond that would be our only water for 12 miles, I met Sean Meadow and PA, both of whom had gotten lost along the same route and made the poor choice to bushwhack back to the trail—they’d just realized they were off course and made to correct it before I had (Sean Meadow later told me she had tried to pantomime our predicament to me, and had though I’d seen her; I can only assume that was when I’d been focused on a string of frolicking antelope in the hills behind her). She’d drawn and treated a bladder of little water for me, and while I redistributed it into my own bottles, we watched a wild horse snort and shake its head at us from across the pond. The horse, a mare from what I could tell, seemed upset that we were there, and she made a fuss on her side of the water before eventually coming up its edge and drinking for several long minutes. When she was done, she trotted off without another loom back at us, farting loudly in time with her hood beats. I jokingly asked Sean Meadow whether the sound had come from her or the horse. That would be the last enjoyable moment of the entire day.

We started walking over several miles’ worth of pointless up and downs (or PUDs), climbing over several vista-less peaks we could easily have circumvented altogether. Over the next couple of hours, a strong, steady wind picked up out of the SW, so that by the time we stopped to eat a joyless lunch on a shade-free saddle, we had to diligently guard our gear so that nothing blew away. There just wasn’t anywhere sheltered to go.

After lunch, the trail turned southwest for 15 miles—so now not only were we hiking further back into the hated basin, but we were doing so directly into a 20kt wind. Walking into the wind for a little while isn’t so terrible, but mile after mile you can feel it wear you down. It’s like walking through sand or carrying an extra-heavy pack. By the time we hit the big-water seep, we were completely demoralized, not to mention wiped out. “If I could quit this trail this very instant, I would,” Sean Meadow said as I lumbered up to the fence where she’d been waiting for me. “I’m sorry,” I said, to which she didn’t say anything, letting the wind take our words and fling them into the silence covered only by the rush of the air around us. I wasn’t sure what to make of that: was it resentment or simply fatigue? The CDT is not a trail so much as it is a very, very, very long series of misfortunes—a fundamental fact about this hike few hikers really understand beforehand. We sure hadn’t.

We’d already known several people who had quit, albeit most of those had been due to injury. How long before one of us just got sick the constant bullshit and walked away from it altogether?

Day 94: 19 July, 30.5 miles today, 1487.6 miles total, Lander, WY

“You think darkness is your ally, but you merely adopted the dark. I was born in it. Molded by it. I didn’t see the light until I was already a man; by then it was nothing to me but blinding.”

The landscape by our camp was completely open: no rises or hills, no rocks, no trees, no bush or shrub standing more and a few inches off the ground. We had gotten up at 0330hrs after a night kept awake by the deafening flapping of our tents in the wind, and there was nothing to shield me from view during my morning cathole routine by the darkness of the overcast night. I dug the hole by headlamp, then turned off the light. I was pooping blind, hoping the entire time not to make a mess of things while I couldn’t see, Bane’s monologue from The Dark Knight Rises running continuously through my head.

I walked back into camp bragging about my perfect aim.

Hikers bury waste; part of the Leave No Trace ethic of living in the backcountry is to poop in what are called “catholes” when no privy, outhouse, bathroom, or pit toilet is available…which on the CDT is pretty much all of the time. The ideal cathole is a minimum of 200’ from any trail, campsite, or water source; and is 6” to 8” deep, which is where most of the microorganisms that break waste down into soil live. Pooping in a hole in the ground is something that civilians and first time hikers make a gigantic fuss over—you hear stories from guides about clients who refuse to relieve themselves for entire trips into the wilderness. In reality it really isn’t that big a deal. Half the time the most difficult part is finding a good spot, though it can be frustrating if the soil is stony or hard. It’s just a little more time consuming than walking down the hall to the bathroom.

It’s a process I never really questioned before the Great Divide Basin, but that section of trail gave me reason to doubt whether the practice was always worth the time. The entire area is covered in shit, from one end to the other. Rabbit shit, badger shit, chipmunk shit, deer shit, antelope shit, horse shit, cow shit, cow shit, cow shit, oh my god so much cow shit. Shit beyond belief; shit beyond reason. I understood that the arid climate meant that it would take longer for shit to decompose, but with 1,500 miles of desert hiking under my feet I’d still never seen anything like it (though the cow-hammered pastures of New Mexico were a close-ish second).

We pitched our tents on shit. We ate meals surrounded by shit. We filtered water from ponds ringed with and presumably full of shit. It got so bad that I stopped trying to walk around the ubiquitous piles lining the trail and simply aimed my feet at what looked like the drier patches. There was literally shit everywhere: why, exactly, were we taking the trouble to bury our own?

It was just one more thing to cope with while crossing the basin. Heat, thunderstorms, heat, wind, bad water, heat, shit, and heat. Sean Meadow started referring to this section as a “death march,” which I initially took to be a bit on the dramatic side until she pointed out that in a land without shelter, any injury that impeded one’s ability to get to water would be immediately life-threatening. Point taken.

The conversation made me think of a hiker we’d met on the very first day on the trail named Mule, a bald forty-something AT alum who walked away from the Mexican Border and into the pitiless desert with an overloaded 75L Ospry backpack, but no hat and no sunscreen. He was brick red from the neck up by the time he staggered up to the water cache at mile 15, soaked in sweat and out of water. We’d hiked on a few more miles that day before making camp, and we’d never seen him again. I wondered how he would have handled the basin, which was comparable to the flaming hell of the New Mexican boot heel, but without shade or water, and with a lot more shit everywhere.

Hiking through an empty, remote desert was dangerous. It was also just fucking unpleasant. And so we deliberately walked through it as quickly as we could. We covered 120 miles in four days—a feat of physical pain and exertion I’d never attempted on any other trail. Every day was long; each one had started earlier than the day before. Every day our feet hurt worse and worse as we pounded the last few miles into them. Every day we felt utterly defeated by the time we pitched our tent and settled in among the cow pies to eat. But we did it, and by 1800hrs on day 4, Sean Meadow and I were standing on the shoulder of WY Hwy 28 with our thumbs out, being completely ignored by all the traffic heading toward Lander.

The hour we spend trying to get a ride into town was as disconsolate as I had ever seen Sean Meadow. We’d been walking since 0415hrs, our fourth 14-hour day in a row. We’d only ever paused for lunch in all that time, since without shade there was no way to take a meaningfully restful break. Broken, frustrated, completely spent with only a 35-mile hitch standing between her and a very hard-earned night in town, I was beginning to worry that if we didn’t get picked up soon I’d find myself at the center of a scene of genuine violence. It was at that moment that a CDT trail angel, who had already passed us by, turned around and pulled over to offer us a ride into Lander.

Our savior didn’t have a lot of room to offer us in his converted van, but he did give me a beer before we started the drive to town. I was seated on his cluttered bed in such a weird, twisted position that I didn’t even notice for most of the ride that he’d cracked one open for himself. He didn’t seem in any way intoxicated, so I supposed I couldn’t begrudge him a single beer—and if any state would truly not give a shit about drinking while driving, that state would be Wyoming—and anyways, I was much more concerned about his habit of gesticulating with both hands while going 80mph on a windy state highway.

But we made it. We survived the Great Divide Basin. We survived the ride to town. We were in Lander, and we could stuff ourselves full of McDonald’s before taking a shower and going straight to bed. At that moment, that was all that mattered.

*119.5, if you really want to be a dick about it

Day 95: 20 July, 0.0 miles today, 1487.6 miles total, Lander, WY

Pushing to get to town so quickly had earned us a full zero. We tried to make the best possible use of it that we could by doing as little as possible—but of course there were chores to be done and a resupply to be purchased from a super overpriced grocery store with the off-putting name “Mr. D’s,” so we did eventually need to get out of bed. The important thing was to keep off our feet as much as possible, and if that meant relying on the McDonald’s across the street as a food source, then so be it. Sure, the place might be staffed by an entire crew no older than 17. Sure, that crew might be in full crisis mode without the calming presence of an actual grown-up to help them remember that nothing in a McDonald’s is ever worth getting upset over. And sure, our passage through the basin had left my lips so chapped that my experience with the spicy chicken sandwich was downgraded to “excruciating” from the usual “bland.” But at least I didn’t have to walk very far.

In the morning we’d once again have to find ourselves a ride before hiking into the Wind River range; we needed every moment we could possibly manage to bolster our faith that one day’s rest could reverse all the damage we’d done to ourselves to get here.