Ghost Ranch is a religious retreat and conference center about 100 miles from the Colorado border and is one of the places most thru hikers zero. The visitors center is filled with posters from all of the western style movies that were shot there. It’s nestled in a beautiful little canyon, has a small but interesting anthropology and paleontology museum and is not just filled with hikers but lots of regular folks too. My main interests there was to pick up my resupply box, eat as much as I could so as not to lose any more weight, and clean up. I had lain on my back in a field the night before while talking to Vanessa an had gotten into something that was making me itch like crazy wherever my clothes had touched the ground. Although I had got there around 6A, the Visitor Center didn’t open until 8A and that was where you needed to buy a ticket that would allow you to eat breakfast that ran from 7-8A. Darn, it, oatmeal again but later I was able to get my resupply box and bought a lunch ticket. After cleaning up and waiting for my laundry to dry, I found a whole bag of trail mix someone had left behind in the biker box. Hmmm…. 22 servings at 170 calories a serving, Perfect! I ate half of the bag. Gotta keep my weight up. Lunch came and I heaped my plate as high as gravity would allow. Bread? Yes, please. Soup? Of course! Would you like my extra dessert? Do chickens have lips? I have to admit, it was a little too much and I wasn’t feeling so well afterwards. It could have been worse. At least I hadn’t gone for the Idahoans in the hiker box too. Anyhoo, my plan was to get back on trail after lunch and at 2P I set out.

My stomach was in no mood for the long and steep climb out of the Canyon. Although it was only a 2700′ climb out, it felt twice that long. I was stumbling like a drunk from one side of the trail to the other, taking lots of breaks, moaning occasionally and somehow squeezed out 14 miles that afternoon. There is a lesson hidden in there somewhere. Maybe someday I’ll learn it.

Everyone was a bit worried about the next few days. This would be our first taste of real snow. One of the hikers at Ghost Ranch said a ranger had told her that there was a rescue in the upcoming sections the day before. In the first couple days, you had to hike 25-30 miles each day so you could camp at lower altitude while the middle of the day you were hiking in snow.

It was the last day that had us worried though as it was almost all above snow line at altitude. Brake Check, Sniffles and I had the same idea that on the previous day, we would hike as far as possible right up to the snow line, get up early, and get as many miles out as we could on the frozen snow until it warmed up and we started to post hole.

I had reserved my nice dry clean socks for this last day and was super happy to start with dry warm feet for a change. After 10 minutes of hiking there was a river crossing and that was that. At least my left foot was still dry. The right one had little jets of water shooting out of the toe.

The CDT is normally pretty difficult to follow through the dense woods without the snow. Throw in 5′ drifts and it was nearly impossible. The woods were full of tracks of people wandering all over the place trying to follow the “trail”. Frequently, you would just follow the most footprints and hope for the best, occasionally checking you GPS to make sure that you were still in the right hemisphere.

At some point I was getting tired of getting lost and wandering through the woods and realized that the folks I was following probably knew about as much as me. I decided to just roughly follow the gist of the trail and make my own easier path through the snow. This was the CDT, and not the AT with its million white blazes or the PCT with a trail so wide you can’t get lost. It was time to grow up. From then on I used my maps and followed ridge lines and fire roads and the actual CDT only when it made sense. It was great!!! The views were more beautiful, the post holing easier, and it was much easier to make steady progress. Unbeknownst to me Brake Check and Sniffles had decided to just follow my footprints and we ended up reaching the New Mexico / Colorado border within 15′ of each other.

About a mile from the end of the trail, I met a nice dude who like to be called Cheshire Cat and his dog Stella and he offered to give us the 12 mile ride back to Chama all crammed into his Honda Element. Wooohooo! No need to hitch into town. Cheshire, Stella, and I raced each other downhill in the snow to his car and covered the last mile in about 6-7 minutes. Welcome to Colorado!

The next step is figuring out what to do next. Sniffles, Brake Check, Compass, and I are all sharing a room now and have been zeroing in Chama until we can catch the Blue Bus into Santa Fe tomorrow which only runs on weekdays. The snow is at record levels in Colorado (738% above average in the San Juan’s) and we all want to enjoy the San Juan’s so each of us is postponing Colorado until the snow melts a bit. Compass is flying up to Glacier and then heading south bound. Brake Check and Sniffles are flying home to Salt Lake City for a couple weeks then will probably hike south from somewhere in Wyoming. I’m going to take a bus from Santa Fe to Rawlins Wyoming and keep heading north until the snow clears in Colorado. I’m having my snow gear sent to South Pass City to help in the Wind River Range and probably won’t come back to hike Colorado until after Yellowstone or somewhere in Idaho/Montana. It’s not quite what I envisioned when I started but the CDT was never supposed to be cookie cutter and is all about adapting and improvisation to what the trail provides.

Goodbye beautiful New Mexico. Au revoir Colorado. On to Wyoming. It’s just going to keep getting more spectacular 🙂