South Pass City, WY to Rawlins, WY
June 17, 2019
We’ve stopped in some tiny towns, but this might take the cake.
Last night we got a hitch to South Pass, a little gold mining town that prospered for a decade in the late 1800s. The town was set up like a museum and I had a really nice time walking through it. We pitched our tents with three other flippers in the parking lot of the town.
The buildings from the gold rush were preserved like a museum, with little scenes set up inside the windows, matching the descriptions in the walking tour brochure.
In the morning we set out on the flat, dirt roads of the basin. We crossed some beautiful creeks and walked through an abandoned ranch.
In the afternoon, thunderstorm clouds we had been watching behind us had finally caught up. I stopped to put on rain gear, but figured we would just walk through the storm.
I passed Driver setting up his tent, and waited for Radio to catch up. It had been pouring, with some thunder. We both walk on and all of a sudden the storm gets much worse. Lightning and thunder directly overhead. We put our packs down and crouch on our pads to diminish lightning risk. We must have squatted for over 20 minutes, shivering from the cold and wet. The pouring rain turned to hail off and on, and I couldn’t wait for it to blow over. The dark skies did not inspire confidence.
With a break in the rain, we decided to get back to Driver and pitch our tent so we could get warm and dry. We were shaking and he was surprised to see us, but we got the tent up quickly and dry clothes on. The tiny break in the sky I had seen was closer to where we were now, but it wasn’t quite there yet. We hunkered down in our tents while the storm continued to rage. Drivers tent apparently had about 2 inches of water in the bottom of it.
When the sun came out almost two hours later, we put our stuff out to dry. We had planned to do this 118 mile section in four days, and only brought that much food. We needed to make up the day to finish out 25 miles to stay on track.
We managed to hit our mileage goal and later in the day found a gorgeous spring, where the water was so clear we could see the spring bubble up from the sand. We camped a bit further on.
June 18, 2019
Today I did my second official over-30 mile day on the CDT! The dirt roads are pretty easy to walk on and we have the longest days of the year on our side.
Today was gorgeous - I saw a lot of wildflowers and deer, along with plenty of cows.
We planned for another afternoon thunderstorm today, but thankfully we were able to avoid it. We ran into Driver later in the day in his tent eating lunch, so we pitched for a bit and remained sheltered from the last of the rain.
At the end of the day we planned to camp near a spring, but it was muddy and full of cows. We camped a bit further on until we found an area free of sage bushes to pitch our tents. The bush was so thick we had to camp separately from Driver.
That night we had a crazy lightning storm that lit up our tent. I think there were two storm systems as the thunder-lightning pattern didn’t make sense. I had a hard time falling asleep because of the storm (and the fact that we had camped under the only shrub in the entire valley). I don’t think the storms got close to us, though.
June 19, 2019
Today was another long day, 33 miles in total. The trail is extremely flat and easy to see - you can see the dirt road for miles and miles.
I met a few other hikers this morning going northbound with their dog.
There’s tons of wildlife in the basin - I saw a coyote or a fox, as well as several types of birds, prairie dogs, mule deer and of course cows. Later on in the day I saw a huge herd of wild horses - two of them came up closer to us, watching. They are so beautiful out here in the wild, playing and running with one another, it was truly a special sight to see.
Even though we have lost all of our trees, the basin is still beautiful in its own shrubby and hilly way. The views have been phenomenal as I try to crank out as many miles as I can.
We meet Driver waiting for us at the water source that marked our 30 mile day. Everyone was feeling pretty good and it was only 6:30 so we pushed on an additional three miles and found a campsite in a dry ravine, attempting to shelter ourselves from the winds that picked up across the basin.
June 20, 2019
Today we had about 25-26 miles to make it to Rawlins, the next town. I had service along the forest roads in the morning and took care of some errands. The trail was partly on highway today, and I had a hard time dealing with both strong winds and the gusts of dust and wind kicked off by giant trucks speeding by. Mentally, it was hard to stay on trail knowing we could hitch and be in town in 30 minutes.
We kept on, and saw another herd of wild horses (this time just calmly grazing), and a bunch of cows with a few wild horses mixed in at the one water source of the day.
Some of the trail today was just cross-country from marker to marker, just out of sight of the highway we were following (the official CDT had been recently re-routed to avoid a long highway walk). Eventually, we met back up with the highway and walked into town.
Driver spotted a little 50s-style diner and I inhaled a strawberry milkshake and a roast beef sandwich. We ran into two bike packers who gave us some beer, and made our way to the hotel for the night.