How do you train for a hike like this?  Given that I’m in good shape to begin with, what specifically makes hiking 20+ miles a day difficult?  From my PCT experience, the only thing I wished was that I had trained my feet not to get blisters.  I still don’t know how to avoid them short of going for 4-6 hour hikes every day, so that leaves me without much training to do.  All I do is go for a couple weekend backpacking trips (which I would probably be doing regardless of the CDT).

So, instead of this being a training guide, you get a trip report!  I climbed Mt. Baker this weekend, in the good company of friends Kent and Danger.  Mt. Baker is volcanic, capped in glacier, and 10,700 feet tall.  Right now, it is buried in snow, down to 3 miles below the trail-head.  We arrived Saturday around noon and slogged up the snow-road to the trail, then upwards snow-shoeing onto firmer snow until we reached 6000 feet.  There’s a nice big flat spot called the Hog’s Back that we completely ignored, instead climbing another 100 feet up the steep ridge, then digging out our own campsite.  We had tons of light, and a fun afternoon digging around in the snow building the perfect campsite.

We got up at 5:30am the next day and snowshoed up in a whiteout.  We had a bit of a snow trail to follow, which saved us from having to navigate too much.  Eventually we came across an even better snow trail from the same day, and they had even put up “wands” (bamboo sticks with bright tape at the top) to mark the way.  We followed their trail up to 9000 feet, and then ran into the party that had set them, just as they were coming down from the summit.  They were very hard-core looking, two big teams of 4 climbers festooned with climbing gear, helmets, ice axes, crampons, fat ropes, etc.  We were a little embarrassed at our lack of gear, so we waited until they headed down before we agreed that we wouldn’t bother roping up due to the beautiful conditions.

We caught our first glimpses of the summit while Kent and Danger put on their crampons, and we dumped bits of gear that we wouldn’t need for the last 1700 feet.  After that, it was a pretty straight climb upwards, and then traversing across a big face to a less steep final slope.  The traverse turned out to be the most tedious part, as I only had my snowshoes with me, and they are not so super at traversing.  I did fine by just going slow and keeping my ice axe well-planted.  There were some steep drop-offs all around, but we were above the clouds and enjoying the views.  After an hour or two of puffing in the thinner air, we hit the top, took some pictures and had a snack.

A bit more after the break… Continue reading →

Are you crazy???!? Why are you doing this?

I actually don’t get asked this too often, I think Canadians are too polite. But my girlfriend, family, and close friends sure hear it though.  I’ll attempt to answer that, although I’m not always too clear on it myself.

I get to be in true wilderness all the time.  One of my favorite hikes close to home is the West Coast Trail.  The best thing about it is being halfway through the trip and knowing that to get to this spot, anyone I meet has hiked for days.  If I don’t see anyone, I can enjoy the solitude of being there.  On a long hike like the CDT, that feeling is true almost every day.

Meeting people is suddenly a joy (for an introvert like me, this is not normally the case).  A chance meeting on the trail can turn into an intense 2 hour conversation, due to both sides being starved for human contact.  I’m not sure if that will happen as often on the CDT, but on the Pacific Crest Trail, I met at least a hundred thru-hikers (this is slang for “people attempting to hike all of the trail in one season”).

A long hike is a walking meditation – when my body is incredibly tired; my brain is fried from keeping me “found” on the trail, what’s left is some sort of subconscious monologue that I can never access any other way.  Ideas bubble up to my consciousness that I can’t place in my previous thinking.  I’m walking along thinking about the next turn on the trail and suddenly I think “maybe I should get a part-time job working at a hiking shop, it would help me be more social”.  Where did that come from?  (I didn’t follow up on that one, by the way).  I feel like I returned from the PCT a changed person.

Finally, a long trail is a huge personal challenge.  Clichéd but true.  When I decided to do the PCT, I didn’t know about any of the other stuff.  What I knew was that there was a trail that started in Mexico and ended near Vancouver.  I thought, hey, why couldn’t I do that?  We’d drive by Manning Park (where the northern terminus of the PCT is) and I’d be thinking “it’s right there!”  I read more and more and eventually realized I was just going to do it, damn the consequences, and no real reason why except that the trail was there.

I don’t know if the above adds up to an answer for “Why”, but that’s what I’ve got.

Guidebooks – crucial on the trail, boring to read and read about 🙂  But as something that will be in my hip pocket every day, I figure you might want to know a little about them!  Every evening I read over the maps and guidebooks for what I plan to walk the next day, and put them in a ziplock in my pants pocket.  As I walk, I tend to keep the most recent guidebook sentence running around my head, trying to match whatever is around me to it.

The CDT has two main groups that support it, the Continental Divide Trail Alliance and the Continental Divide Trail Society (CDTS). They each make their own set of guidebooks for the trail. This is pretty excessive considering how few people actually hike the trail (less than 100 per year!). The CDTS books are currently the standard due to their emphasis on concise trail descriptions. When combined with the Jonathan Ley maps I have a fairly lightweight solution to keeping myself found on the trail.

The guidebooks come in multiple parts per state, and sometimes with a supplement written more recently than the original.  The last revision was in 1991, but apparently the guidebooks are still useful.  There are supplements for some areas provided from 2005-2010.  The CDTS also sends out newsletters occasionally with more updates.  I have incorporated the updates by writing them into the margins of the existing books.

I’ve divided the trail up into large sections, about half a state each.  For each of those sections, I have taken the guidebooks and maps, and divided them into ziplock bags.  I will take one bag from my bounce box each section, and hopefully mail home the previous set.  Old maps make neat mementos later, but it’s just as likely that I’ll be throwing them in the garbage when possible, to save the weight.  I’ve also taken each guidebook and removed all the pages that aren’t directly relevant to the hike.  This includes covers, appendices, and low quality “area maps”. Yes, I’m that anal about the weight 😉

The Continental Divide Trail is like a “choose your own adventure” story. It has two places to start in Montana and three places to finish in New Mexico. Throughout the rest of the trail, there are tons of choices where you can go over the top of mountains, or through the valleys. To help navigate these choices, I will be carrying a variety of maps.

A hiker named Jonathan Ley started a great resource in 2001.  He took the USGS 24k topographical maps of the US and pared them down to exactly the amount you need to follow the trail. When there are alternatives, he included maps of those too. The trick is that the maps don’t necessarily show the CDT, so he had to overlay his idea of where the trail actually went. And since the trail is unfinished, he has to update it every year based on what sections of trail get completed… and sometimes when fires burn through, the trail gets rerouted and that has to get inputted too. Ley does this all for free, which is truly amazing. To get a copy of the maps, you simply have to ask him.

The only real downside to the Ley maps is that they’re so “zoomed in” that if you get lost at all, you’ll be off his maps very quickly.  To combat that, I have to carry some maps for each section that provide an overview of the area.  Ideally, they would show the major roads and trailheads nearby too, so if I get hurt I can find my way to civilization.  I originally intended to carry big road atlas map pages to cover me here.

Since PresiNET agreed to sponser me, one of their contributions was an iPhone so I could continue this blog as I hike.  I’ve discovered that it can easily handle the job of providing overview maps (especially since I don’t expect to need them very often).  As a bonus, an iPhone also has a built-in GPS receiver, so it can pinpoint me on these maps when I do get lost.

In some areas, I expect that my hike will take me far off the CDT.  The best example of this is through parts of southern Colorado.  By the time I get there, winter will be approaching, and snow is almost certain.  If I want to stay on the CDT, I would have to arrange to have my snowshoes sent to me.  Fortunately, there are many existing trails in Colorado, so the possibilities of avoiding the snow are endless.  I have purchased some very pretty National Geographic maps of the area that will hopefully allow me to find a way through.