This is a blog of my southbound Continental Divide Trail thru-hike, which is starting in something like…..10 weeks. More or less. The Trail starts at Waterton Lakes, British Columbia, in the Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park (what an awesome name.)
The CDT is my 3rd long trail (else than the Long Trail!). I stumbled into this thing called thru-hiking in 2009 with a thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail. Actually, it all started quite suddenly before that, on a steamy hot July day in a cooperative house (“co-op”) in Washington, D.C in 2008.
I was working 12-hour shifts in the ER at GW hospital and had random days off during the week. If you have ever spent a summer in DC, you can sympathize with how I was feeling–the city is built on a swamp, and during the summer, humidity is extremely high, and you kind of just feel like the whole city is rotting, and you are rotting along with it. (Don’t get me wrong–I love DC. But I will never spend another summer there.) One day I got up in the sweltering heat–it was my day off, and I thought, “Why am I spending my day off in this sweltering city? What am I doing? I should go hiking!” I didn’t have any experience hiking, really, but I figured it wasn’t too complicated. I drove out to a little state park in Virginia and just started walking on one of the little trails. And it felt…so…good. I felt like I had stumbled upon some secret. I started doing little 2- and 3-mile hikes close to the city, about once a week. One day, I hiked up to what was marked as the junction to the Appalachian Trail. I had heard about the AT and had heard that a friend of a friend had hiked the whole thing a few years before. When I reached the junction, there was an old wooden sign that said, “Appalachian Trail. Harpers Ferry, 25 miles to the right. Shenandoah National Park, 30 miles to the left.” I looked at that sign. I realized that I could get to Shenandoah, a place we normally spent 3 hours driving to from DC, simply by walking there, with my own 2 legs, right from that point. And I wanted to do that, right then and there. And that’s how a thru-hiker was born.
I can’t explain to you the appeal. I don’t know why I love it so much. But the love was there, and the desire was there, before I had trail legs, and muscle memory, and ultralight gear. In his excellent CDT journal, Jonathan Ley says, “I knew why, but I couldn’t explain it, even to myself.”
So, I hiked the Appalachian Trail, followed by Vermont’s Long Trail, following by the Pacific Crest Trail in 2012. I took The Mountaineer’s “Basic Alpine Climbing” course last year, which is more peak-bagging, up-and-back trips. Sometimes, you do things that propel you along in life. And sometimes, you do things that make your heart swell with love, turn your mind on, and fill up your legs with energy. Thru-hiking does that for me.
My parents have told me I tend to live “in the moment.” I’m hoping to blog this trip so that friends and loved ones can join me “in the moment” for this trek.
Counting down the days.
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