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Adventures of the Spirit Eagle - Colorado CDT - Introduction

  by Jim & Ginny Owen

A Short Tour of the CDT in Southwestern Colorado

Last spring Ginny and I had to decide what to do with our vacation this year - and the obvious answer was that we were going to hike - somewhere. But where? Glacier NP was a possibility, as were the John Muir Trail and the Sierra High Route. But when push came to shove - it had to be on the Continental Divide Trail (CDT). And it had to test our knowledge and abilities at altitude since I’ve never hiked at 10000+ ft altitudes and it’s been 7 years since Ginny hiked the JMT. For a number of reasons, we finally settled on the San Juan loop of the CDT in Colorado. First, because it’s reputed to be one of the most scenic and beautiful parts of the CDT. Second because it involves distances and altitudes that would test us physically, mentally and emotionally. Third, because of time and weather constraints most CDT thruhikers skip this loop and take the Creede cut-off. And we recognize that we might end up with the same constraints and take the cutoff as well. This way we’ll have hiked this section of trail, even if it’s not in the same year as our thruhike. And fourth, this was a test run for our projected ‘99 CDT thruhike. We haven’t spent more than 4 days on the trail in over 5 years now - we needed to know how we’d deal with longer trail time - and with the CDT itself.

The original plan was to do the half-loop from San Luis Pass to Squaw Pass ( about 100 miles), but being thruhikers - that didn’t seem like enough distance for 2 weeks of hiking, so we added the 43 miles from Squaw Pass to Wolf Creek Pass so we could include the entire Weminuche Wilderness. That felt better. But then, between work, school, snowpack, mosquitos, weather, etc. we couldn’t schedule the time we wanted to go (the end of August), so we had to modify the time frame to the first 2 weeks in August. And then we realized that starting with high mileage days at 10000 to 11000 ft altitude wasn’t really smart - so we decided to start at North Pass (CO 114) and head south through the Cochetopa Hills. This would give us 2 extra days at 9000 to 10000 ft to acclimatize. Only we didn’t change our end point - we still intended to finish at Wolf Creek Pass - which increased our projected mileage to 185 miles. We thought we could do it, but couldn’t be sure with only 14 days hiking time.

One of the problems we encountered was transportation. There’s little if any public transportation in that part of Colorado that will do a hiker any good and the road distances are larger than life. So we went to the Internet and got very lucky by finding someone who was going to Colorado the day after we were and was willing to drive us to the trailhead. This also gave us an extra day for acclimatization. We flew into Durango and left our travelling clothes and the duffel bags that we used for the packs at the motel and rented a car for the drive to the trailhead.

Resupply was somewhat simpler - starting at North Pass, we planned 5 days to get to CO 149, which runs between Creed and Lake City. So we sent a mail drop to Lake City and planned to pick it up on Aug 5. That part worked very well. The second leg of the trip was to be 9 to 10 days into Wolf Creek Pass and then hitchhike into Durango. And most, but not all of that part worked as well.

The guidebook came from Jim Wolf at the Continental Divide Trail Society, with the late addition of the newly printed "Official Guidebook for the CDT in Colorado" which was published in cooperation with the Colorado-based Continental Divide Trail Association. Of the two, I personally prefer Jim Wolf’s book even though the version we had was an old one. A new one will be published this year. The CDTA book has a lot of good information on trailhead access, off-trail facilities and some alternate routes and is (mostly) accurate and clear. Most of the time we followed the "official" route. The official route follows Jim’s recommendations in most places. (His guidebooks predate the "official" trail by several years.) Occasionally Jim Wolf suggests bushwhacking instead of following trails or dirt roads, either to save pointless ups and downs or because the cross-country route is more scenic. To save time and effort, generally we chose to follow an existing trail rather than bushwhack. When we have a bit more confidence, we’ll probably be more willing to take chances. As a first encounter with the Rocky Mountains, we felt more secure following trails. Each of the guidebooks has unique information and I’d recommend using both of them in preparing for the CDT.

The maps we used were Trails Illustrated and USFS maps, with the addition of a couple of USGS topos. We used the USGS county (1:50,000) topos and they worked very well even though they don’t contain the detail of the USGS 7.5’ series. None of the maps are entirely accurate where specific trails are concerned, but they’re a necessity if you don’t want to spend a lot of time "wandering in the wilderness". The TI map #141 (Weminuche Wilderness) is topographic and easy to use, but is missing one section of trail and has another trail mislabelled as the CDT.

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© Copyright 1997 Jim & Ginny Owen