Welcome back to my blog! I’ll try to finish up my posts about New Zealand by year’s end, but right now I am off on another grand adventure; I’m hiking for 9 days, 180 miles, on the Continental Divide Trail as I join Ben for a section of his complete thru-hike from Mexico to Canada.
I’d been thinking about hiking a stretch of the CDT with Ben after joining for the last week of Te Araroa in New Zealand, but plans crystallized when I was invited to Ruby & Kendall’s wedding over in Spokane WA. Ben was passing through a town a perfectly timed 2 days later, and furthermore it was in Grand Lake at the edge of Rocky Mountain National Park and the start of what I expect to be a spectacular section of trail!
Ben is going at full solo thru-hiker pace this time rather than the relatively moderate pace of the TA; 20 miles/day at 10,000+ft in the Colorado Rockies rather than 20km/day at only a few hundred meters elevation dropping down to the New Zealand coast. At three months out I was determined to get in excellent shape. I got some jogging and dieting in, and I’ll see how I do with what progress I actually made. I’m hoping it’s like The Fifty where gumption can fill any holes in my fitness and I can recover from pushing myself to the limits after this week.
My journey started with 27 hours of travel to get to the wedding, including a 7 hour overnight layover in Seattle when Alaska Air changed my flights, and a 6 hour road trip up from Portland to Spokane. It was worth it though, spending quality time with Hannah and Aylin, and the first 2 hours driving through the Columbia River Gorge were gorgeous.
We made it to Spokane, admired the waterfalls, and found the cute wedding venue. The wedding was lovely, seeing these two friends so in love, and I saw a lot of college friends for the first time in years. Phi Tau basically took control of the dance floor, and wowed the other guests with the energy in performances of ‘Every Time We Touch’ and TSwift’s ‘Trouble ft. Goats’.
A few flights later and I was in Denver, the furthest I have ever really been from the ocean (760 miles). A few nail biting moments when my bag took literally 10 minutes after everyone else had collected theirs to pop out on the luggage carousel (hiking the CDT out of a 16L daypack??), a shock when it turns out Denver airport is 26 miles and an $80 cab ride from town, and the next morning I was riding Amtrak’s California Zephyr up into the Rockies.
Adam Schneider met me at the train station with his girlfriend, and we had a great time catching up, comparing bike crashes, and sharing Biostretch stories perhaps not suited to the lunch table.
All that was left to do was wait for Ben, so I parked myself on the porch in front of the post office with a stack of postcards to write and waited.
And waited.
Hail fell, followed by rain, and flashes of lightning as thunder echoed between the mountains and threatened to split the sky.
And I waited.
Finally, on my last 3% of phone battery I headed back to Main Street, where at 1% I heard that I had indeed missed Ben in the storm (turns out the Post Office wasn’t even on the trail), but I could meet him at the laundromat. Success! We did the necessary grocery resupply, had a great BBQ meal in town, and devoured some large ice creams from a highly recommended ice cream shack (New England memories; Hilo just doesn’t have that type of place) before hiking up to the Shadowcliff hostel, an eclectic retreat center that reminded me a lot of the Moosilauke Ravine Lodge. We met loads of other CDT hikers there, and are right on the doorstop of Rocky Mountain National Park for my first real day of hiking.
