CDT - Atlantic City to Rawlins

Published on 2023-08-19 by Michael Stanton

To go back to days 139 and before, click here.

131 miles, 8,500 feet elevation gain in total.

After our dinner at the Miner's restaurant, we hung out at the campground a little while, sitting at a table while our laundry washed. We drank a Coke from a vending machine. Later we crawled into the sleeping bags, but were kept up by a man in a nearby house singing country songs. He had a microphone and an electric guitar too, and it seemed to be a nightly concern for everyone, willing or not.

August 19, day 140

28.1 miles, 1580 feet elevation gain.

For long stretches the trail wandered through the grass alongside a dirt road. We just walked the road in those cases. As I've said before -- I like roads. I can keep my eyes up and think about the distant shapes on the horizon. No purist, me!

Water would be a constant issue for us in the next days. We kept careful track of how many miles until the next water. There were two or three water caches in here maintained by volunteers. You really shouldn't rely on them. We compromised...we looked at the last date someone in the FarOut app said there was water there. Because we are right in the season, it was usually only one or two days before. My impression was that this meant it was likely there would be some. Still, we rarely allowed ourselves to run out of water completely before such a cache. It might be necessary to walk another 10 miles, who knows?

Early morning walk on one of the longest days of the trip.

The Oregan Trail comes through here.

Cory ahead of me in the blazing sun and rising wind.

A biker doing the bike version of the CDT kept us company for a while. He had been at the campground, too. Oh! I forgot to mention that a nice lady brought us breakfast pastries and some fruit for breakfast. I really have to say it is impressive how many times strangers showed us kindness like this. I'll have to add it all up into an impressive list.

Looking back to the Wind Rivers.

After the difficult ups and downs of the Wind Rivers, these long straight roads and trails were a dream. As evening approached, rain clouds came from the west. We'd always seen them over the Winds in the last days, but now they stretched out their hand. I suggested stopping to camp. No sooner did Cory agree, then the wind picked up like crazy!

Suddenly, I was trying to hold down my tent, almost lying on top of it and scrambling to find rocks and other things to hold it together. Cory struggled with his tent, but was distracted by my hollering and yelling. In fact, I was enjoying myself but I tend to make a lot of noise. I made a big error by putting one of my ski poles upside down. In the stress of the wind, it ripped a hole in the tent. Dag nabbit!

I turned the pole over and tried again, lashing down the tent corners. Then it started to rain, huge, fat pelting drops.

Somehow I got everything finished and threw the pack in the tent.

Then the rain stopped and the wind died down.

Hmm. Okay...

After a freak wind and rainstorm, things are calm again.

The dramatic sky was impressive.

The rain stopped and the ground dried immediately for dinner.

We ended up sitting outside Cory's tent and eating dinner. It might have rained a bit in the night, but there was no repeat of the dramatic freak storm.

August 20, day 141

27.4 miles, 2850 feet elevation gain.

8 in the morning on a sea of grassland. We're going into that cloud ahead.

Beautiful, silent hiking. Listening to music, certainly. I was really enjoying this place. And I was happy with the 28 miles from yesterday. Today would also be long, but I felt up to it. We were heading towards some hills in the distance which were being overrun by clouds. Interesting...

We passed a water cache and drank up. It was neat to see the names of people we knew.

Various folks, some of whom we know (like Whitney and Swede).

Wild horses in the basin.

There were wild horses out here. We were mostly climbing up into higher country, occasionally dipping to a saddle. It seemed like we were on a northern escarpment of the basin that was higher. The wind became very strong at times.

Cory looking thoughtful.

Somewhere beyond halfway we took a long rest at a little water resevoir, laying down, eating and drinking. A young woman came along and Cory chatted with her a while. I ended up getting irritated by the conversation! Cory said we were going slow, taking it easy, that we'd had a hard couple of days. But from my perspective, this was a fun part of the trip. And I thought that performance wise, I was doing well. And I was enjoying doing well. I was like "don't speak for me man...I'm happy and fit. I'm going exactly at the right speed!"

It is true, that we were some of the slowest travellers in the basin. That is because people regard this stretch as odious, and tend to set up challenges here, like the "50 mile day" or "24 hours challenge to Rawlins," or whatever. I heard of several variants on this theme, and the people doing it were always young, ambitious and enjoying punishing themselves like that. I was taking a page from Cory's book, however, in saying to myself that well, we had X days of food and Y miles to cover, therefore we simply had to maintain a pace of Z miles per day. We were, in fact, beating that, but not by a whole lot.

When we started walking I shared all these thoughts, making myself rather unpleasant company for a while. This also connects to my earlier apprehensions that Cory was travelling too slowly to meet his goals by sticking with me. I think I said "you aren't my nurse!" Naturally, he rejected all such interpretations, and at least outwardly, was bemused by my irritated outburst rather than angered. He's a mature dude.

Anyway, having said my peace, I felt better. I'm just not a modern hiker. If I do more than twenty miles in a day, I'm glad and proud. I don't do thirty mile days and I don't feel "bad" about that. Hmpf.

But there was a consequence for my ranting: we lost the trail! The trail goes up a narrow slot to a higher plateau after the water source, but we walked a dirt road due south. We finally discovered the error and tried to fix it without backtracking. We'd have to go cross country to the northeast for a couple of miles. We lost each other in here, taking slightly different lines (probably good for us, lol). We climbed about 300 feet up into scrub trees and a few rocks, then reached the high plateau and followed cow paths through the sagebrush. I saw Cory off to my left for a good ways. Finally we met again and walked to a last water source before camp.

It was a riverine slot where hunting upstream for a bit of flowing water paid off. I think we met another guy in here, but I am hazy on the details. Carrying a bit of extra water we pressed on. With great views to the south, we walked down a long arm of the high country to a dry riverbed at mid-elevation. This was the best campsite of the stretch: grassy, protected from wind, peaceful and isolated.

We slept well, at least I did! Cory probably thought "when do I get away from this high-strung dude?!"

Hot part of the day in higher country. If you zoom in, Cory is visible far ahead.

August 21, day 142

23.8 miles, 1640 feet elevation gain.

We packed up and spent a couple hours getting down from the mountains. The excitement was a north-south road with an occasional vehicle in the distance. Wow! Cory was ahead of me, and took the official line, while I enjoyed a more direct route that appeared to save a couple hundred feet of up and down. There was a spring here, protected from the cows by a fence. We tanked up and kept walking.

We were at a low point of 6800 feet, having come down from about 8000 the day before. Now we'd start climbing again, and it was a good idea. It was hotter down here! And the wind was terrible. And the SAND was terrible!

We were on a straight roadbed that continued for so many miles up the hill, and then miles beyond that. However, we couldn't just walk straight in the roadbed, because we'd run into deep sand. Maybe the other tire rut is better? Sometimes it was, but sometimes we just had to climb up out of the roadbed and look for a cow trail along the side. So this was very tiring.

We stopped at a gate at one local high point and a truck drove up. A nice fella got out and asked if we needed water. We didn't, partly because we knew there was a good solar well up ahead. He was checking the fences.

We descend into a basin (of the basin) today.

Cory fights the sand, wind and heat but especially the sand!

A well-deserved rest at a solar well.

This day turned out to be a shorter one, only 24 miles. Eventually the sandtraps ended as we climbed into higher country, reaching 7800 feet in the early evening. I looked back in the screaming wind into the blasted desert sea of our passage.

Amazing.

Wonderful, really.

The road goes ever, ever on.

Our camp was right by the straight-as-an-arrow trail. We climbed over a fence to get some protection in the corner of a sandy lot. What a day.

August 22, day 143

25.2 miles, 1520 feet elevation gain.

We packed up, climbed over the barbed-wire fence that marked our "house," and headed out for the water cache up ahead courtesy of the Bairoil Baptist Church. We found a guy sleeping on the ground next to the Igloo ice cooler that marked the cache. Hated to disturb him, but well, thirsty is as thirsty does!

He was travelling north and described a lonely journey, avoiding as many towns as possible. We read the logbooks, drank up, then got going again. We passed a couple of hikers conked out on the side of the dirt track, probably young folks doing one of their "marathons" that the Basin seems to exist for in their minds.

We reached the highway and an oasis! A kid had ice cream for us.

We hit a last watersource surrounded by cows. We could even see a huge barn on a hilltop to the south. That was the only structure we'd seen in a long time. Cory mused about the relative cost and profit of taking care of cows out here. How would you make sufficient money? It seemed very difficult.

We climbed above the watersource, then entered an up and down country, the road a straight line across asymetrical hills. Finally we came to a hot and blasted country at about 6500 feet elevation. We rested in the sand at the Mineral X BLM Campsite, apparently abandoned. No shade out here. For hours we saw the highway, with semi-trucks barreling south to Rawlins looking like tiny toys in the distance. The last miles to reach the highway felt purgatorial in the heat.

We got there and started walking the road, nearly being blown over by the trucks. It got to where I would brace myself when they passed. I had to tighten down my sunhat to keep it on.

Signs appeared telling of pie, cookies and ice-cream up ahead. Oh boy! Really!

Yes, really! Well, ice-cream anyway. The 12-year-old boy manning the snack stand was out of cookies. He'd given the lot of them to the pretty girl a bit ahead of us. Anyway, this was a fantastical and whimsical episode right when we needed it.

Our best nap of the trip...a glorious hour under trees, which we haven't seen for many days.

We walked the road for a few miles until an off-ramp would let us head back onto the trail by a water source. However, we couldn't resist a glorious stand of trees. I forgot what they looked like!

We lay down under the trees and had the most glorious of naps. The best of the trip, really. Our rest breaks always seemed to end too soon, but not this one. We milked it. We knew we'd camp somewhere before Rawlins, so it didn't matter too much how far we went at this point.

Shortly before the storm broke near Rawlins.

Finally we packed up and walked over to the fenced-in spring, an oasis of green in a brown land. A young lady came along and we pointed her to the water. Then we hiked uphill on faint trail. The weather was dramatic, with clouds and occasional sprinkles called forth by the mountains on our right, which overlooked the basin and might be the source of strange weather by the uplift and difference in temperature.

As we came down from a hill I heard explosions. Gunshots? Strange. We got on the south side of the hill and it was clear they were gunshots. Even a ricochet quite near me. We started waving our arms.

We got down to a road and some trees. Turns out it was a man and a woman firing pistols at the hillside! We said a girl was coming along that way. They seemed neither surprised that their practice hill was a national scenic trail, nor that they'd almost hit us. Maybe they were drunk? Hard to tell. Glad we didn't get shot.

We hoped to camp where they were, but with shooting and drinking, we thought it better to move on. However all of a sudden it appeared that a huge storm was going to come. We set up the tents a couple miles earlier than planned.

Ate dinner, and then came the wildest storm of the trip. Hammer blows of thunder, shotgun pellet rain and hail. A real crazy 30 minutes or so. The young lady had walked past us a few minutes before. Heck, maybe it was localized and she escaped. Or maybe she got soaked.

August 23, day 144

13 miles, 360 feet elevation gain.

It would be an easy half day into Rawlins. First on trail to the west of the highway, then on the highway. We listened to music and thought about pizza and big breakfasts. In fact, a big breakfast of pancakes, sausage, eggs and coffee were want both of us tended to want most.

We got to town and asked a couple if there was a diner. They said we'd just passed one. Hmm. Maybe it was closed. All we saw were Forest Service administration buildings. We went further into town and asked some other people, but we heard that labor was scarce and therefore restaurants had closed.

Finally, we did find a coffee shop. Praise be! I hung around while Cory went in search of pipes. I'd been so into cigars, it tempted him to try and replicate a good pipe experience. In fact, he'd ordered pipes and tobacco for us at South Pass City, but they didn't arrive. He did find us pipes here in town, and in the evening, taught me how to better keep it lit by cupping my hand just right over the pipe. Nice!

6:30 in the morning, let's start walking.

Sunrise is fantastic out here.

We set up at this incredible hostel in town. I'll tell the story about it (and the pet goat) in my next installment. It was my last night with Cory. He would go on, and I'd take a rest day.

It made sense. But I would miss him, too.

To go forward to days 145 and after, click here.