Day 96: 21 July, 19.7 miles today, 1507.3 miles total, somewhere in WY
The five of us sat in the McDonald’s, our greasy breakfasts long finished, nursing our second or third large coffees and drawing out the moment when we would eventually have to leave. I looked down at my phone to see a notification telling me that the package I had already arranged to have forwarded to the next town up trail had just arrived at the post office across the street, some thirty minutes before it opened. That at least gave us all an excuse to keep sitting around in the hard plastic booths for another half hour before we’d have to do anything.
At exactly 0830hrs, I walked into the Lander post office just as the door was being unlocked. By 0835 I was back in McDonald’s, unboxing my new sleeping pad, a replacement for the one that had become a frustrating quilt of patches and leaks that I’d given up trying to fix after my last repair in Steamboat hadn’t solved the most recent problem. The last night in the basin I hadn’t even bothered to keep reinflating it throughout the night—once it had flattened out, I just lay on the ground and waiting for the morning to come. But now all that was over. I threw the old pad in the McDonald’s garbage can without a second thought and packed up the new one. I’d forgotten how clean and bright they are when they’re fresh from the packaging.
Out of excuses, we headed out of the restaurant and up the road to try and get a ride. We were only at it for maybe 10 minutes when a woman in a station wagon pulled over. There was only room for three, she said, so after quick deliberation Sean Meadow, PA, and I piled in. She was a very nice lady, a 9th grade English teacher and a backpacking enthusiast, but it was hard to follow the conversation from the backseat with the windows rolled down. Eventually we made it back to the CDT, bade our driver farewell, and got ready to start hiking. We spared a moment to hope that Unknown and Elf had been able to get a ride shortly after we’d left, but we never did see them again the rest of the day.
The north side of WY Hwy 28 was like night and day compared to the south: almost at once we passing in and out of stands of trees that slowly thickened until we were walking through a forest. The pines sheltered us from the sun and blocked the wind, as we stepped over cool, clear stream burbling though the forest floor every mile or two. The contrast to the environment we’d only just left couldn’t have been more stark.
It was, on the whole, a pretty gentle day of hiking. We ended up at a BLM campground with picnic tables, a dumpster, and a pit toilet. The next day we’d enter the Wind River range proper; the terrain promised to be significantly more difficult than what we’d seen today, but the scenery was supposed to match it in intensity. I was looking forward to seeing what this next section had in store for us, but first I needed to give the new sleep pad a try.
Day 97: 22 July, 19.0 miles today, 1526.3 miles total, Bridger Wilderness, WY
I can’t remember what it’s called, but there is a term for the human impulse to double down on a bad decision. You try to win your money back with one more deal of the cards. You keep waiting for the bus even though by now it’s so late you’d already be at your destination if you’d walked. You have children with the spouse who has been chronically cheating on you in the hope it’ll bring the two of you closer together. You try to bushwhack your way through a clusterfuck of blowdowns to an easier stretch of trail.
To be fair, we had it easy compared to the hikers who came through this section last year, when the blowdowns were so bad for so long that people, moving much more slowly than they had counted on, started running out of food and had to bail out for an unexpected resupply. We really only had two or three truly terrible miles, but they were, indeed, truly terrible. So bad that we started trying to find an alternate way to get to the trail junction that would eventually lead us out of this mess.
It was a bad idea from the start: bad as the blowdowns over the trail were, the ones scattered atop the steep mountainside we were trying to bushwhack across were worse, piled at odd angles on top of each other, and littered with branches that made it impossible to see through to the other side and which grabbed and pulled at our packs and poles. Every downed tree was a labyrinth unto itself of sharp, stabby sticks and splinters. We were trying to cut west, but after half an hour’s agony and hard effort, we’d only gone maybe half a mile south—and a little to the east. We tried several times to make the plan work, but there was no safe way through. We headed back uphill to reconnect with the redline, with pulled muscles, twisted ankles, scratched a bloodied legs, and, in my case, shorts ripped up the back.
Not that that was any easier. Finally, over an hour after we’d left the CDT, we were back on it, shaken and exhausted. We’d made about 0.2 miles of progress in all that time. Now we just had to navigate all the blowdowns across the trail we’d been trying to avoid.
After much clambering, climbing, and crawling, we made it to the junction with the Cirque of the Towers trail—which, aside from its reputation for being a beautiful stretch of trail, would also allow us to bypass the next several mile’s worth of blowdowns ahead on the redline. Not that the trade off would come cheap, as the alternate’s reputation also included some rough and very steep terrain.
That we were prepared for. We were less prepared for the trail to be more of an idea on a map than something we could follow in the real world. Frequently, there was no trail—nor were there markers, cairns, trodden earth, or any indication whatsoever that such a path existed and where it may lead. We constantly had to check our location against the supposed “trail.”
It was an tiring, discouraging day. All I wanted was a hot meal and a good night’s sleep, but it started raining almost as soon as I walked into camp. We got the tent up quickly, as a dozen weekenders came trudging in to join the dozen already set up in the area. I could only hope that we wouldn’t be in for the long night the groups multiple campfires and raucous laughter would suggest.
Day 98: 23 July, 22.2 miles today, 1548.5 miles total, Bridger Wilderness, WY
The evening’s rain put an early end to the weekenders’ campfire social, and overall the entire lakeshore was quiet, calm, peaceful throughout the night. In the morning, we did see some lights shining in a cluster if tents pitched a ways away above a small rise, but we each thought so little about it that we wouldn’t mention it to each other until much later.
Still on the Cirque of the Towers alternate, we started climbing immediately out of camp, essentially hiking up to the lip of one granite bowl and down into the next. I was working my way down toward a small cluster of tents on the bowl’s bottom when I first heard the voices. By the time I’d passed the tents, a collection of extremely loud young women had drawn close. They passed through the tents, yell-talking like they were in a club shouting to be heard over the music, instead of walking through someone else’s sleepy campsite at 0630hrs. I hated them immediately.
When the first three caught up to me, I stepped aside to let them pass. One of them said to me, “there are six of us,” in a tone that suggested she expected me to wait for the entire party to go by. I looked back to see the last three still 500’ behind. I had hiking to do and I wasn’t going to stand around for several minutes waiting for some self-absorbed ding-dongs to pass—especially not after I’d watch them wake up an entire valley so they could scream about which vegan cheeses were the meltiest. They had caught up to me because I handle steep descents like an 80-year-old man with a broken leg, but I handle steep climbs just fine. So it was that I was stuck behind the half-group I’d let pass until they paused for a break at a trail junction. Elf, Sean Meadow, and I would end up leap-frogging with the group we dubbed “the sorority” for the rest of the morning.
It was a morning otherwise defined by steep terrain and incredible scenery. I still don’t think I’d agree with the assessment given to Sean Meadow and me the day before that Cirque of the Towers was “the crown jewel” of the CDT, but it was indeed beautiful. We were surrounded on all sides by exquisite granite spires and fins, pyramids, cylinders, and blades, all towering a thousand feet and more above our heads. It was an awe-inspiring sight that we were each rather too tired to really appreciate in the moment. At our feet, the alpine meadows rioted with color, the wildflowers saturating the ground with thick swaths of vivid reds, lurid yellows, bright lavenders, and rich indigos. I’d never seen mountain flowers grown so dense before, and the contrast with the solemn granite peaks was truly stunning. No wonder the trail was absolutely jam-packed with weekenders.
As we left the Cirque trail and rejoined the CDT, we finally lost the sorority for good, but were soon inundated by another pest. We’d been warned that the mosquitoes in the Winds would be worse than anything we’d encountered thus far, and boy howdy did those words turn out to be true. While I might walk a few miles and find just one or two of the little buggers trying creepily to exsanguinate me, other times they were so thick on the wing that I couldn’t see—because they kept flying directly into my eyes. It was difficult even to slip a bug net over my head without enclosing a half dozen mosquitoes against my face. Dinner was spent in full rain gear (as the shell material seemed to be the one thing the insects couldn’t penetrate), working spoonfuls of food under the net. It was a process we were each relieved to finish so we could flee to the safety of our tents.
Traveler beware: the guardians of the Winds are small but they are legion, and they defend the beauty of their realm with a fierce and terrible jealousy. Their vampiric kiss will not kill you, but its insistent bite will torture you past the point of endurance and into madness. I still can’t decide if the grandeur is worth the price.
Day 99: 24 July, 25.5 miles today, 1574.0 miles total, Bridger-Teton NF, WY
I was slowly breaking—pushing too hard with too little time to recover, and it was showing. Every day I seemed to walk a little bit slower, until the day we had to pound out 25 miles to get to town I was demonstrably, objectively, unequivocally, and obviously dragging ass.
I did everything I could to save time, taking only a 10 minute lunch and not stopping to collect water just in case we couldn’t get a ride at the trailhead and had to camp. I started walking at 0545hrs, pushed hard all day, and still didn’t finish until 2045hrs. 15 hours of almost constant effort for 25 moderate miles. I had worn holes into my skin at a few key places from wearing a pack in the hot sun for that long, and for what? On both the AT and the PCT, I hiked at a fairly consistent 3mph once I had my trail legs; now I was creeping by at just over half that.
I now had to grapple with the very real possibility that I would not physically be able to finish the CDT: if I couldn’t up my pace somehow, I wouldn’t be able to cover the distance remaining before the winter claimed northern Montana. At the moment, I was getting my miles…but just barely, and the effort of keeping up was starting to wear me down. I had been dreaming of hiking this trail for years, and it was starting to look more and more as of if completing a thru-hike was simply beyond my meager abilities.
It was a very lovely day. The weather was nice, the scenery incomparably beautiful. I was just too frustrated to care. When I finished the 11-mile side trail that was our only option for hitching to Pinedale and got to the trailhead just after sunset, it was immediately clear that we’d missed any chance we might have of getting a ride into town that day. The nearby Forest Service campground was completely full (a grim surprise at dusk on a Sunday), but a family of van campers invited us to pitch our tent on their site. Too discouraged for food, I went to bed without dinner, staring blankly at the roof of the tent until my weariness overcame my frustration and I finally fell asleep. I had tried my best and found that it wasn’t nearly good enough.
Day 100: 25 July, 0.0 miles today, 1574.0 miles total, Pinedale, WY
We managed to get a ride from a local trail angel at 0730…which even allowed us to sleep in for a while, until someone drove up to the parking area with a horse trailer and started making a huge goddamned racket. Once I’d finally fallen asleep, I’d slept soundly, but still woke feeling tired and unrested. The day’s upside was that I didn’t have to walk; the downside was all the chores I’d have to do once in Pinedale.
The only really novel chore was buying a can of bear spray—which is literally just pepper spray in a giant, oversized can. I was still doubtful as to its necessity, especially weighing in as it did at well over half a pound.* Sometimes, though, you don’t carry something because you think it’s particularly useful, but because everyone around you gets upset if you don’t. C’est la vie.
The unexpected chore was cleaning and treating a case of pack rash on my shoulders and belly that had gotten bad enough to blister—without my even noticing. I’d never had an issue with strap friction before, but here we were: in a Pinedale hotel room lancing blisters on my stomach with a sterilized safety pin. And who said hiking wasn’t glamorous?
We met up with Unknown and PA to have dinner with Shorty, who had bailed a third of the way through the Cirque of the Towers. He’d been feeling weak, on top of the leg and foot pain common to all thru-hikers; beyond that he was feeling defeated. He’d walked off the trail with the intention of quitting altogether, but once in town had decided to postpone that decision while spending a few days in Pinedale recuperating. After dinner, PA observed that the suffering we were all enduring must be much harder for Shorty, who had been hiking around other people since his Tinder adventure had left him a couple of days behind our group, but hadn’t been hiking with anybody. This distinction was important: I thought about the evening I’d lumbered into camp just before dusk on the day of the Blowdown Bushwhack, tired and miserable, and what a relief it had been to hear that Elf had had just as shitty of a day. It meant that I wasn’t alone, that this endeavor was not just difficult for me. The Latinate roots of the English word compassion literally mean “to suffer with.”** In bearing his misery alone, Shorty’s ultimate affliction was a lack of compassion.
Maybe. I couldn’t help but notice how much he struggled to climb the stairs to the mezzanine at the local brewery. Hiking alone was probably not good for his spirits, but he was also definitely physically injured. We could only hope that he’d be feeling well enough in body and soul to join us again down the the trail. In the meantime, we could raise our glasses in a toast as we enjoyed one more meal together.
*which may not sound like much, but for reference, the bear spray weighed almost two ounces more than my ice axe had—and as the trail saying goes, “every ounce counts.”
**Com (with) + Pati (suffer) = Compassio (suffer with)
Day 101: 26 July, 18.1 miles today, 1592.1 miles total, Bridger Wilderness, WY
The ride Elf had booked for us pulled up to our hotel shortly after 0800hrs. We were all packed up and ready to go, reluctantly. Thank goodness he had made the arrangements the afternoon before; otherwise we’d likely have found ways to spend half the day procrastinating our return to the trail. As it was, we were walking our way back to the CDT before 0900.
The crowds were impressive, to say the least—especially since we’d expected the fact that it was Tuesday to mean that the weekenders would all be back in town, going to work. Some of them probably were, but there were still dozens on the trail, each with a sleeping pad and a tent strapped to the outside of a giant 70L backpack that bafflingly still wasn’t big enough to fit everything inside it. At least most of them were friendly.
The day’s walking wasn’t terrible, but by the time I came up to the others at camp I was ready to be done stepping over rocks and hoping across wet, marshy meadows and overflowing streams. There were even several extant snow patches we had to cross, despite the fact that we were barely above 10K’, and despite the fact that it was almost august, and the weather had been predominantly hot and sunny for weeks. So be it.
We made camp before 2000hrs for the first time in what felt like years. What a joy and a relief it was to lie in our tent, with plenty of night yet to rest and recover for the following day. We could hear the ceaseless piercing drone of dozens and dozens of mosquitoes trying desperately to find their way to us through the mesh, but it didn’t matter. For the first time all day they couldn’t get to us. Let them whine about it until the sun went down, and all of us, humans and mosquitoes alike, called it a day and turned in for the night.
Day 102: 27 July, 25.4 miles today, 1617.5 miles total, Bridger-Teton NF, WY
We had pre-decided not to take the scenic alternate route over Knapsack Col, despite its reputation for rivaling (if not surpassing)(but just barely) the beauty and splendor of the Cirque of the Towers. Most comments in guide said some variation of “Don’t miss this!!!” We missed it. Everyone in our group was feeling beaten and worn, and nobody was particularly thrilled to take on a 13-mile trail that reportedly took an entire day to hike as much of it involved scrambling up, over, down, around, and through massive piles of boulders. It also happened to bypass one of the most scenic stretches of the redline, which section included zero boulders. So maybe we didn’t “miss” it as simply chose to do something else equally worthwhile. I am sure the Knapsack Col enthusiasts will disagree.
But whatever, we woke up to this:
The morning’s walk was simply gorgeous, with each step revealing new facets in every granite obelisk, spire, and pyramid. I am surprised I didn’t trip and stumble more often than did, so focused was my attention on the stone faces rising thousands of feet above me. “We are truly among gods,” I thought, not for the first time. Each peak is a presence, motionless and still and yet somehow animate. Mountains on this scale just feel alive.
The killer views continued well after the Knapsack Col alternate rejoined the redline, but stopped rather abruptly when the trail made it clear of Squaretop Mountain—one of the most iconic sights of the CDT. You’d think that mountains that size would slowly shrink as you came to the extent of their range, but no. The Winds just kinda stopped after that, leaving what looked like a hillier, somewhat wooded version of the basin ahead of us. As we left the Bridger Wilderness, and thus formally left the Wind River Range behind, we were overcome with heat and biting flies. We cursed the return of the fields of sagebrush, until we created a hill and found a forest dense with double and triple-decked blowdowns and swarms of mosquitoes so thick it was impossible to breathe without inhaling one or two. It seemed horribly unfair: to be bereft of the beauty of the Winds, but still be made to live with their pitfalls. This was how the day ended, and it was a relief to crawl into the relative safety and comfort of the tent—free for a few hours from voracious insects amid the endless obstacle course of dead and rotting trees.
Day 103: 28 July, 28.3 miles today, 1645.8 miles total, Bridger-Teton NF, WY
A more or less typical day’s diet on the CDT:
0500
instant breakfast shake (“chocolate” flavor) w/ instant coffee 130 calories
4 handfuls honey-roasted almonds 640 calories
0750
Generic brand “protein chewey bar” 190 calories
1020
12ish handfuls accidentally (but not unexpectedly) pulverized cheez-its 900 calories
1320
2 fish tacos: “lemon pepper” tuna, flour “street taco” tortilla, drizzle honey, drizzle hot sauce 310 calories
3 handfuls honey-roasted almonds 480 calories
3 handfuls jellybeans 300 calories
1610
Generic brand “protein chewey bar” 190 calories
2020
Generic brand “protein chewey bar” 190 calories
2 handfuls honey-roasted almonds 320 calories
Crushed (intentionally) ramen w/ soup base equivalent to ~1.5 packages 550 calories
3 spoonfuls Parmesan cheese 70 calories
5 handfuls peanut m&ms 1100 calories
5,370 total calories for the day—which, given the fact that my continued weight loss had entered a stage we may conservatively call “concerning,” means either my math or accounting was super wrong, or I was in reality burning way more than the “5,000 calories per day” that is the standard figure cited for a thru-hikers nutritional requirements.
We met our first SOBO in the morning. It was still fairly early in the season—we hadn’t expected to start meeting thru-hikers coming the other way for another couple hundred miles, at least—but he admitted that he’d started early and hiked through a lot of snow in northern Montana. He fascinated us, with his knowledge and experience of places we hadn’t been; and while he was incredibly friendly, it was clear we didn’t hold him in thrall in quite the same way. It took us a moment to work through our collective excitement before Elf remarked that he had met every NOBO ahead of us before laying eyes on us. By that point, we were nothing special. But he was nice.
We also met the thru-hiking family, a group of two parents with five young children whose progress Sean Meadow had been following with the zeal of a supermarket tabloid. It was perhaps more amazing that this group was incredibly friendly, as the very idea of hiking anywhere—let alone the CDT—with a baby and four other youngsters boggles my own personal mind. They were cheerful and engaged, the children happily participating in the conversation being had by the grownups, the five-year-old girl going so far as to stick her face in Sean Meadow’s armpit to test the claim she had made to the father that it didn’t stick even after several days hiking. “Smells fresh!” she declared.
Very little else of note happened. It wasn’t a fun day, nor an interesting day, nor a particularly beautiful day—but it was a long day, with a lot of open fields and thin forests littered with blowdowns. I spent much of the afternoon listening to thunder peal and roll first from this direction and then that before finally getting caught in a downpour that lasted just long enough for me to don my raincoat. I caught up with Sean Meadow, who was not having the best afternoon, and whose afternoon continued to decline as she slipped in mud and stumbled over loose sticks laying across the path. “I hate this fucking trail,” she said as I helped her to her feet. I could sympathize.
What was really getting to me was a hole that had gotten worn into my shoulder during the 15-hour day I had failed to make it to the Elkhart trailhead in time to get a ride to town. I still couldn’t figure exactly why it had happened, but wearing my pack for 12-14 hours every day was most likely preventing it from healing. It hadn’t bothered me much in the morning, but by the end of the day the pain was constantly somewhere in the forefront of my thoughts.
We made camp on a small plateau sheltered by gnarled trees, with a view of the Tetons far off in the distance. As I watched the sun set behind the mountains, I was struck by the wonderful strangeness of the Teton skyline, which looked like a four-year-old’s crayon rendering of a mountain range. We wouldn’t get any closer than this, but as I rubbed the aching wound in my shoulder and looked out at the orange water-color bloom behind the peaks, I was simply thankful for what I could get.
Day 104: 29 July, 18.0 miles today, 1663.8 miles total, Dubois, WY
Technically we’d been in grizzly country since we first entered the Wind River range, but it wasn’t until we came out the Northwestern edge of those mountains that we actually started taking it seriously. Bears sometimes wandered into the Winds, but were generally uncommon; they were said to thrive in the hills westward toward Yellowstone. In fact, a “problem bear,” which had allegedly killed a free-range calf grazing on National Forest land, had been reported in the otherwise almost completely unremarkable area through which we’d have to cross to reach the road to Dubois, our next town stop. For this reason, Sean Meadow insisted that we spend the day hiking together.
You’re supposed to make noise in areas known to be populated by grizzlies: the idea is that most bears would prefer not to interact with you, either, and making a racket gives them a chance to slip quietly away before you can accidentally walk into them. Often, this can be harder than it sounds. It’s difficult to think of songs to sing, and yelling “hey, bear” gets tiresome very fast. Talking works, but again, it can frequently be hard to maintain a conversation for an entire day’s worth of hiking. Not today, however.
Sean Meadow had decided to quit the trail, and there were several frayed ends we hadn’t yet discussed. If maintaining a healthy relationship is hard work, and thru-hiking is hard work, maintaining a healthy relationship while thru-hiking is very hard work. Not everyone can do it, and for the most part I’d been fairly proud of how well we’d done, but there had nonetheless been some fundamental challenges we hadn’t managed to address particularly well. To be clear, it was the CDT itself that had worn down her interest in continuing to hike the CDT. But the fact of this ridiculously difficult trail’s scenery being composed of barbed wire and cow pies interspersed only occasionally by anything actually worth looking at was aggravated by the frustrations of hiking with a partner whose speed so mismatched her own.
This is, of course, one of the most common problems among couples who thru-hike together. Hiking pace is a significant factor for choosing trail partners—not so much for romantic partners. When real-life couples start walking together, it often happens that one of them is a great deal faster than the other. So it was with us. Naturally we’d talked about it, at least a little; but only now that Sean Meadow’s departure from the CDT was imminent did the difficulties we had left unaddressed come tumbling out. In hindsight, there were definitely a few things we probably ought to have tried to even out our respective paces, but for this hike they were all at this point pretty much moot. We could try them another time, on another trail. It wasn’t as if the shit-flavored cake that was the Continental Divide Trail would have gone down much better for her if we’d managed to scrape off that one layer of icing.
She would leave the trail after Yellowstone, and I would keep going. While Sean Meadow has an undeniable stubborn streak, it was nothing, apparently, compared to my own mulish determination to suffer every last stupid mile to Canada.
Day 105: 30 July, 0.0 miles today, 1663.8 miles total, Dubois, WY
We were all tired. Sean Meadow was the only one planning to end her thru-hike, but all of us had grown thin, perennially weary and in pain. It hurt to walk—the one thing, unfortunately, we spend nearly every waking moment doing.
So when we heard of an alternate route with the potential to shave off 200 miles or more from the CDT redline, we were immediately interested. The cumbersomely named “Big Sky-Butte Super Cutoff,” known more popularly as the “Big Sky alt” or the “Super Butte,” would bypass the long, meandering section of the main pathway where it bounced aimlessly back and forth across the border between Idaho and Montana; making instead a graceful arc from West Yellowstone to Butte, via the town of Big Sky. At first glance, it seemed like the perfect option for us. When we met a 2018 CDT hiker who recalled with confounding fondness how that section of the redline was “400 miles of following a barbed-wire fence through rolling cattle pasture,” we were sold on the alternate. This wasn’t some stunning and unique marvel of nature we were going to miss, but more of the same shit we’d already had to walk through for a thousand cumulative miles.
We met at lunch to discuss the details of the route and maps we’d be using to follow it, as well as the intricacies of acquiring the permit we need to backpack through Yellowstone NP. We were joined toward the end of the meal by a charming Italian hiker, who was gregarious and funny and utterly appalling in her complete disregard for proper food storage in grizzly country. There are a number of things you’re supposed to do to prevent encounters with the animals while you’re living in their territory, but none is so important as cooking and storing all food (and anything scented, such as toothpaste or sunscreen) well away from your camp. The Italian hiker—whose name I never caught, so whom I will just refer to as Donna—was unconvinced, and had not only apparently continued to eat in her tent, but saw no reason not to continue to do so. “What,” she said, “is a bear going to come to my tent when I am inside? No.” “Yes,” we replied, “that’s the whole problem.” But she remained implacable. “All I have to do is stay in my tent and no bear will come to it,” she insisted. We could not convince her otherwise.
We stopped by a nearby convenience store/gift shop which inexplicably sold really good homemade ice cream, and sat around for a while on the porch, chatting. We parted ways with Donna, heading back to our hotel as she went back to wherever mysterious place she was staying. “She’s nice,” we said as we walked away into the afternoon sun, “it’s too bad she’s going to be eaten by a bear.”
We agreed to take another zero to shore up our plans and make sure we had all the information we needed before setting back out. It would be our first double zero since Sean Meadow and I had gotten stuck in the grotesquely overpriced mining village of Creede. We did need the time to get our navigational and logistical ducks in a row, but for me it was a much needed opportunity to rest and recuperate before returning to 12-14 hours of daily hiking—and a double zero was a luxury we could only afford now that we were planning to take the Big Sky alt. I hoped it would help: it was still a long, long, long way to Canada. I would need every ounce of strength I could manage to muster.
Day 106: 31 July, 0.0 miles today, 1663.8 miles total, Dubois, WY
One of every thru-hiker’s top priorities in town is to eat as much real food as humanly possible—or more, if they can manage it. Regardless of the back-of-the-napkin numbers outlined above, no hiker lugs her insanely high daily caloric needs on her back. Food simply weighs too much, and eating the proper amount to replenish energy spent would burn too much daylight that could otherwise be spent walking. As a result, every hiker carries a substantial caloric deficit while in the backcountry. It may sound melodramatic to put it this way, but in a very literal sense thru-hikers on trail are starving.
It’s the single biggest reason this lifestyle is fundamentally unsustainable. We can’t even make up the difference by gorging on town food when we get the chance. I had spent much of the CDT intentionally packing out more calorie/protein/fat rich foods than I had on either the AT or the PCT, and in town I never passed up an opportunity to order two meals in one sitting and then stop for ice cream on the way back to the hotel. Even so, the body that started at the Crazy Cook monument in size XL clothes fit comfortably into the size M shorts Sean Meadow found in a hiker box in Dubois.
That’s not a brag. Whatever else this undertaking may be, in this sense thru-hiking a 2,000+ mile trail is inherently unhealthy. In fact, hikers who are naturally lean have to be extremely careful to eat as much as they can at every opportunity in order to avoid catabolysis, the process by which the body cannibalizes its own muscle tissue for energy. While never exactly a good thing, catabolysis can cause permanent organ damage in as little as one month—and hiking a triple crown trail typically takes at least four. I have seen Unknown sadly reach for full-fat ice cream when what he really wanted was sorbet (which, unfortunately in this situation, doesn’t have any fat at all); and when Shorty rolled into Dubois, he reported that the malaise he’d been feeling in Pinedale was cleared up by carrying twice as many snacks—after three straight days of hamburgers and ice cream.
There is some truth in the common perception that thru-hikers get to eat whatever they want without worrying about gaining weight, and I won’t deny that the second meals I’ve ordered in restaurants after finishing the first ones have been earnestly enjoyed and savored. There is, nonetheless, an unwholesome sort of feeling that seeps into your being when you eat a giant plateful of ribs and steak fries and you’re still fucking hungry. Being an insatiable pit is chronically uncomfortable—and it’s also expensive.
But it can be fun, too, even in a tiny hamlet like Dubois, where we’d eaten at every restaurant in town by noon on the first full day—and visited the souvenir shop that sold plastic cups of amazing homemade ice cream several times already. We wouldn’t make up our calorie deficit, even in town, even on a double zero. But we would do our damnedest, eating everything in sight while we could; and if we didn’t find the best burger within walking distance of the hotel, well, it wouldn’t be for lack of trying.
(not pictured: the hubcap-sized cinnamon role I also ate for breakfast)