America's Triple Crown

Hiking through Wyoming's Great Divide Basin

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The Continental Divide enters the contiguous United States in the Chihuahuan Desert in the "boot" of New Mexico and exits some 3,000 miles later among the towering mountains of Glacier-Waterton International Peace Park on the border between Montana and Alberta. The trail that runs along it is the last, the least complete, and the most remote of the nation's three major north-to-south trails. In geography, it is to some extent similar to the Pacific Crest Trail, meandering through six of the seven ecological zones of North America, from the New Mexico's redrock country to Colorado's highest peaks. The environmental challenges - desert, altitude, snow, thunderstorms - are the same, especially for thru-hikers, who usually arrive at the highest mountains just in time for snowmelt.

However, as similar as these two trails may seem, the CDT offers the backpacker a completely different experience. The main reason is that the CDT is not yet complete. Plans are afoot to construct, designate, connect, and mark the entire trail by the year 2000 - to tame it, in other words. But the Divide has a habit of thwarting human ambitions, and until a trail is in place, the CDT may offer the most remote and strenuous wilderness challenge in the contiguous United States.

To see what this means, think back for a moment to the well-marked, completed, white-blazed, protected Appalachian Trail. Long distance hikers on the AT spend inordinate amounts of time debating the nonsensical ethics of deviating from the official trail. If you go off-trail to a shelter, must you return to the AT the way you came? What about taking a shortcut to town to resupply? Are you officially on the trail if you wander off route a bit? On the CDT, these discussions would be even more ludicrous. Imagine crawling up a sandstone mesa that disintegrates under your hiking boots and debating the ethics of staying on an official route that has not yet been marked or constructed. What about when a rockslide dams a creek and drowns the trail? What about when there never was a trail? How do you know if you're officially on the trail when the guidebook reads,"Crawl under the barbed wire gate at 10.5 and curve left to cross the dry gully of Dead Ox Creek." What if the guidebook can't even find the trail? During our 1990 thru-hike, Dan and I didn't see a single CDT marker in the entire state of Wyoming - including in Yellowstone National Park. In Montana and Colorado, which boast long stretches of completed trail, I don't think there was a single day that I walked without needing my map and compass at hand.

This means that a hike becomes an adventure. You look at the terrain in a different way. A mountain is not merely a photographic subject or something to climb; it has a name and can be located on a map. If you are lost, it can help you find yourself again. A water source is not to be taken for granted, and certainly not to be passed, especially if you do not know where the next one will be and can't count on finding it. A trail may lead where you are going, and then again, it may not. You cannot follow a path blindly, or even confidently. An adventure teaches you to question: Are you where you think you are? Are you sure you want to be here, and not there? As you learn to question, you gain confidence in your answers.

Like the PCT, the CDT delights in paradox. It is the most remote and isolated of the national scenic trails ? in the entire state of New Mexico, we saw one other backpacker ? yet it is impossible to walk through this land and not feel its connection to humans, past and present. Today, that connection is tenuous and threatened by development, land use, and the bitter debates over logging, cattle grazing, mining, and water allocation. The CDT passes through great mountains and big forests and deserts of spectacular, subtle beauty. It crosses clearcuts and over-grazed rangelands and past the slag heaps and crumbling shacks of mines that have been inoperative for decades. It also sees well-managed ranches where the grasses and wildlife are thriving, and small towns whose people are worried about losing jobs that pay five dollars an hour. It runs through all of the contradictions and controversies of the modern rural West, and because you are traveling at the rate of 2 or 3 miles and hour, you have time to see the issues up close.

It is September and we are in South Pass City, Oregon. During the great migration, this was on the northern route across the Rockies, one of only two places a wagon could cross the Divide. During the Civil War years, it was the only route. It wasn't an easy trip through this bleak sagebrushed landscape. You can see for miles, for all the good it does you; for miles, there is nothing to see, nothing except sagebrush and cactus and the occasional puff of dust as a herd of antelope takes off on a madcap dash across the empty expanse. The emigrants hugged the Sweetwater River; our route follows it for a while, and then turns off, jumping from waterhole to waterhole. One of them we share with a dead antelope.

At South Pass City, we leave the Oregon Trail for good and head north, to the craggy peaks of the Wind River Range, into exactly the kind of inhospitable, precipitous terrain that would strike terror into an emigrant's heart. Gaining elevation, we see that the aspen have turned. The grasses have deepened to a dark ocher somewhere between yellow and orange, and when they catch the light of a setting sun, they glow like burnished copper. The sun hangs low to the south, sleepy and weak, and we find ourselves putting on extra layers of clothes.

We are not, it seems, so very different from those early settlers. Like them, we steal glances at the northcountry sky, which now reflects the angled light of autumn. Like them, we calculate and recalculate our rate of progress, knowing that we have many miles still to go. And like the settlers, we are thinking about winter.