The Great Divide Basin: Days 65-70

HD: It is difficult to exaggerate the difference between the Wind River Range and this section of hiking. It felt like a different planet. High desert, no trees, endless horizons, no people. Just us and the cows.

The  Great Divide Basin is an area where the Continental divide splits and makes a big 150 mile diameter circle (water just drains to the center and disappears instead of traveling to the Atlantic or Pacific oceans). It is still relatively high (6,500’-8,000’), but the grade and tread

are the best that we’ve experienced. This allowed for more expeditious travel over the 115 miles between Atlantic City and Rawlins.

Inertia was the word of the week as we “accidentally” hiked 41 miles on our first day, and 36 the next –  both much farther than we’ve

walked before in one day. This required travel late into the night. It was a good experiment but not a sustainable model for the future in Colorado. Our feet hurt.

Although one may consider this section boring, I definitely felt more connected to the American West after experiencing it at 3 miles an hour. We hiked along the Oregon Trail route for several miles. This area is where almost all settlers headed west traveled through – there’s no mountain range to kill you or to break your wagon. Still, it is inhospitable. We stopped at a spring for water and the deep ruts from wagon trains of centuries past were still visible in the hard dirt.

Our driving motivation for hiking fast was, as usual, food and a bed. We ate fast food for three meals in a row as we haven’t seen a chain restaurant in forever. I reaffirmed my love of Domino’s, my indifference to McDonald’s, and my disappointment in Taco Bell. The Thai restaurant lunch buffet was a big hit with all thru-hikers, and we reunited with several friends that we caught up with after our big mileage walking.

After a day off in Rawlins, we’ll cross I-80 and head south for 6 days to Steamboat Springs. Crossing into Colorado on September 1st (on schedule!) will begin a measured but hurried march through the state to beat the first snowfall of the year, whenever that is…

MC: We had miles between Atlantic City, WY and Rawlins, WY – our next pit stop on this little adventure we are doing. Our planned timeline was 3.5 days, which included three 33 mile days, followed by a 12 mile day into Rawlins, all across the Great Divide Basin (Google it, it’s long and flat “ish”). 

As we hiked out of Atlantic City, we quickly found ourselves 10 miles down the road, in great spirits, and early in the day…this led to dangerous thinking…what if we did the 24 hour challenge?!? Hike for 24 hours straight! This will get us into Rawlins a day early and we can have an extra day off! We quickly realized that hiking for 24 hours sounded counterproductive, so we decided to try and hike roughly 48.5 miles because there was protected camping at that mileage and it still got us our double day off (makes a lot of sense…). After over 30 miles done for the day, we had dinner and were excited to start dusk/night hiking. Whelp, after about 90 minutes of that experience, it gets pretty old. You hike with a headlamp on, and you stare at the ground the entire time in fear of tripping over a rock or falling into a random hole in the ground made by a local small mammal. We made it 41 miles before calling it quits. The problem with this mileage was that our next two days needed to be 36 miles each in order to get our double day off. 

We woke up the next day a little demoralized; we walked over 40 miles and it was HARD. Now we needed to do that again, two more days in a row, to get our reward of extra time off. We decided to play it by ear and see how we felt that day; if we felt good, we would walk 39 miles, which left the last day to 34 mile and would get us into town in the evening as planned. We were on the fence the entire day until we made the decision to go for it; that is – until the Wyoming thunderstorms hit. We ended up night hiking again but falling short by 3 miles (36 miles total) because of the severe weather that moved in. We had to emergency camp that evening, which is challenging because you can’t see any flat spots while hiking at night, and also even though the terrain is flat, it’s covered in sagebush. 

So if we do math here, we needed to do another 36 miles to get into town on the third day. This means night hiking again, and getting into town around 9pm, which is optimistic; however, at this point we are committed. The third and final day was going fine, but we were tired, and our feet were tired. So a decision was made that once we made it to the highway we would hitch into town, and then the next day we would hitch back and hike the remaining 15 miles of our continuous footpath. This would allow us to get off our feet, get dinner at a normal time, and also get some of our chores accomplished ahead of time. 

The CDT forces everyone to walk on the highway for about 1.5 miles, and after 20 minutes of trying to hitch, we finally got…TWO trucks at the same time! The truck we chose was driven by Robert, and young man who worked in the local oil field. Robert asked us if we needed another ride to get out of town or back to the hitch location, which was the case; he said he was going to work on the same road that next morning and would pick us up at the hotel for 0620 if we wanted. This was an opportunity we couldn’t pass up, and we said that would be excellent! So the next morning we walked outside the hotel and Robert pulled up to pick us up. 

When he dropped us off us off, he gave us a deer antler rack to remember him by, (we will send this home, because you have to, it’s too good of a story); it’s simple and shows how wonderful a random human interaction can be. 

So now we sit in our Hampton Inn hotel room in Rawlins, WY, and we’ve done our chores, we’ve watched movies at night, we’ve eaten our weight in fast food which I’ve been craving, and we get a WHOLE additional day off tomorrow (28 August). 

Colorado is on the clock.