[Day 71] Red Desert

Technically, the trail is out of bounds of the Continental Divide split that defines the Great Divide Basin, but the proximity is close and the ecosystem is similar where it’s still very much high, flat desert. I’d call it a Basin from the views — or at least I am looking into a ditch in the continent. This is still certainly territory of Wyoming’s Red Desert.

The Great Divide Basin is a unique feature to the Continental Divide Trail, but there exist plenty of no-outlet, endorheic basins in the west. The Great Basin, not to be confused with the Great Divide Basin, includes nearly all of Nevada, much of Utah, the Eastern Sierra Nevada and Mojave of California down into Baja California, and parts of Oregon, Idaho, and Wyoming. The Great Divide Basin and Great Basin do not connect — the Rocky Mountain ridge is the separation. Since Bridger Pass before Rawlins, the trail has skirted the eastern and northern split of the Basin and will return closer to the watershed divide in the Wind River Range.

I awoke to sore foot pads and slight aches in my shin bones. Otherwise, the body felt like the same as any other day, despite the absurd mileage yesterday. I laid lazy in my tent until 8am, packed up slowly until 9am, and was walking sometime after that.

As expected, the trail followed the spiderweb of dirt roads in the Basin, heading towards the old mining towns of Atlantic City and South Pass City. The high desert of the Basin reminds me much of a grassier Mojave with denser sagebrush. Like I’ve previously noted, it feels like a concert of prairie land and desert. Trail merged with the Oregon Trail and the California Trail, which provided an east-west route for wagon travel from America’s eastern plains to the west coast in the 1850’s. The Seminoe Cutoff, which trail followed, eliminated some rigorous climbing and a few crossings of the Sweetwater River, providing an alternate for wagoners during seasons of large snow and snowmelt.

The Wind River Range, which has been faintly in view since yesterday, is now a defined part of the skyline. I am excited for these mountains. I expected them to be the Sierra of the Rockies. At least from the pictures I have on memory, I recall lots of granite. I don’t want to speak to a land I haven’t seen yet, so I will save my lame photography skills to do the talking.

Leaving the water cache, water sources were not particularly skimpy or distasteful. I cruised some 25 miles on a single water carry of two liters (my thirst was quiet). The Sweetwater River, flowing very well, provided me my last water source of the day, and I carried three liters to my camp. Of course, I can’t walk a day on the CDT without expectation of a storm. The skies did not fail today, and I was rained on for two hours until a couple miles before camp. I was, however, rewarded with an excellent rainbow and sunset over the foothills of the Winds. The sunset was an epic symphony of the edge of a wispy rainstorm, vast desert, and peaking mountains ahead.

Signing off,

Zeppelin / fReaK (ON a leash)