The Continental Divide Trail: 'Overall It's Amazing, But You Have To Be OK With Getting Lost'
After tramping more than a month some 700 miles along the fabled Continental Divide Trail, Mystic native Hilary Sueoka and her boyfriend, Dan Stedman, who started hiking April 22 at the U.S.-Mexican border, finally rambled from the deserts of New Mexico to the mountains of Colorado – only to find themselves slogging through 10 feet of snow.
“We snowshoed 100 percent for 120 miles, but in the San Juans there was a ton of snow, very wet and soft. We were postholing all the time, even with snowshoes, and avalanches caused big detours,” Hilary said.
So she and Dan made a difficult but practical decision: Get off the trail in Colorado and arrange for a series of rides to Rawlin, Wyoming, where they picked up the footpath again and continued their long march to the Canadian border.
After tagging the northern terminus at Montana’s Glacier National Park – on a wretched day that started with torrential rain and switched to sleet, hail and finally heavy snow – Hilary and Dan drove back to Colorado where they had left the trail and “leapfrogged” to hike the 700 miles they skipped.
By then most of the snow had melted, revealing the Rockies in all their splendor, and on Sept. 16, Hilary and Dan became only among about 200 people each year who manage to finish one of the most challenging long-distance hikes in America. In just under five months they hiked some 2,900 miles, through deserts, over 14,000-foot peaks and in some of this country’s most exquisite, remote wilderness.
Hilary and Dan now have completed two legs of America’s triple crown of distance hiking. Two years ago they hiked the 2,650-mile Pacific Crest National Scenic Trail, which also runs between Mexico and Canada, along the West Coast from southern California to northern Washington.
All that remains is the granddaddy of all hiking paths, the 2,189-mile Appalachian Trail – but it’s too soon for anybody to contemplate such a journey after five long months of hiking.
What makes the Continental Divide so difficult is not just the extremely varied terrain and weather, but the fact that large sections of the trail are poorly marked. The trail basically follows the Rocky Mountains along a geologic line that separates North America’s drainages – all waterways west of the divide flow toward the Pacific Ocean; those east of the divide run toward the Atlantic. Unlike other popular paths, such as the Appalachian Trail that is marked with white blazes all the way from Georgia to Maine, the Continental Divide allows – or sometimes forces – hikers to pick their own routes, which can lead to missteps.
“Overall it’s amazing, but you have to be OK with getting lost,” Hilary said.
Established by Congress in 1978, the Continental Divide National Scenic Trail is only about 70 percent complete, requiring a significant amount of road-walking, particularly through New Mexico. A coalition of volunteers has been working to direct the path away from pavement in order to create a more pristine walkway its entire length.
Like most Continental Divide hikers Hilary and Dan mailed provisions ahead to a dozen or so more remote locations, but for the most part they were able to resupply at various towns every five days or so.
“One of the biggest mistakes we made was accidentally going to a grocery story hungry,” Hilary recalled with a laugh. She and Dan loaded their packs “with about six tons of cookies.”
Most of the time, though, they exercised restraint and kept their packs to around 35 pounds, which included food, clothing a tent and sleeping bags, as well as snowshoes and parkas for the high-mountain sections.
Among the highlights were Glacier National Park and the Anaconda Pintler Wilderness in Idaho.
“Glacier is so gorgeous, huge granite cliffs everywhere. And the Anaconda is in stark contrast with the rest of Idaho, which is pretty rolling. You get steep mountains, really jagged, with high passes and alpine lakes. It’s sort of like the Sierras,” she said.
The pair saw only one grizzly bear south of Yellowstone in Wyoming – luckily at a distance – but had one amazing encounter early on, farther south in New Mexico.
“We saw this elk running full speed,” she said, and a moment later discovered why: A wolf, right on its heels. The wolf eventually gave up the chase. They later saw many more elk, but no more wolves.
Hilary, who now calls Boulder, Co. home, grew up in Mystic and graduated in 2005 from The Williams School in New London, where her mother, Nancy Spillane, was a chemistry teacher. Her grandfather, J. Niel Spillane of Mystic, is a former mayor of Groton.
Hilary is visiting friends and family in Connecticut now but plans to return soon to Colorado, where she will go back to her old job at a mountaineering/ski store in Boulder and Dan will return to his job at a ski resort in nearby Nederland.
She figures it will take another couple years to save enough money for their next adventure.
Happy trails, Hilary and Dan. From my perspective you have the right approach to life.
Tackle the Trail race Oct. 17
Speaking of trails, you don’t have to travel halfway across the country to experience an off-road challenge.
Tackle the Trail, a 19.4-mile foot race along Eastern Connecticut's Air Line Trail from Pomfret to Willimantic takes place Oct. 17 as a benefit for the Qunibaug Valley Community College Foundation.
Open to individuals or relay teams up to five members, the race begins at 9 a.m. at the Route 169 trail head in Pomfret and finishes on Milk Street in Willimantic. There is a $100 fee for individual runners and $150 fee for teams, with prizes awarded in several divisions.
For more information visit www.qvcc.edu/tacklethetrail; to register visit www.thelastmileracing.com.
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