August 19th
Leaving Rawlins, a CDT hiker is confronted with a choice. There is a road (10 miles paved, 30 miles gravel) that is straight. From it, the official CDT breaks off after 3 miles and then does a 45 mile arc to then return to the road at mile 30 or so. Another way to describe it is a giant capital letter D, with the road being the straight part and the trail the curve. While I generally prefer trail over road, the additional miles of alkaline sage brush in waterless terrain was not interesting at all.
So, at 5:15 am I left my cozy motel with 7 days worth of food, 5 liters of water, new shoes, and a new balanced backpack. It was heavy, but I churned up the road.
There were few listed water sources, so the extra water was needed. The road was lightly travelled so it was not too bad. Basically, a buried aqueduct parallels the road. The only other point of visual interest to me was that some type of air inversion was happening. When I left Rawlins, it was foggy. As I crested the pass leaving Rawlins, it cleared. Later as I looked backwards, the cloud bank was making its way to the bluffs and alternately shrouding their tops or eerily sliding down the sides.
I did have a slight ethical challenge along the way. At one point the aqueduct crossed a silty, alkaline stream. However,a valve was broken. Thus cold, clean water was leaking out and then in to the stream. I would put the rate at about a gallon a minute. There were some small cairns nearby so I could tell this was a known water source. On the other hand, the owners of the aqueduct were clearly losing their product and did not know it. I decided to look for contact information for the aqueduct owners. However, the only thing I could find along the way was a number to call before digging. Since I got no signal I failed to do anything. Not sure if I will burn in hell for this one, but time will tell.
The only other thing to report was a preponderance of vehicles on the gravel road towing off road vehicles. It is curious to me the range and popularoty of this recreational activity. Some pickups will have a single ATV in the back. Others will tow a trailer that has two side-by-sides in it, one a four seater and another a two-seater.
As the sun was going down I found a campsite away from the road and close to a creek that appeared to have a low TPG rating (turd per gallon). The wind really picked up so I was in for a little bit of a noisy night’s sleep.
backpacking over the hill 