Day 073 - Continental Divide Trail - Whiskey Creek to Battle Pass

Day: 073

Date: Thursday, 18 July 2024

Start:  Whiskey Creek

Finish:  Battle Pass

Daily Kilometres:  36.3

GPX Track:  Click here for Julie’s Strava & Photos

Total Kilometres:  2123.5

Weather:  Cool early then mostly warm and sunny with a thunderstorm in the early afternoon.

Accommodation:  Tent 

Nutrition:

  Breakfast:  Pop tarts/Muesli

  Lunch:  Snacks

  Dinner:  Rehydrated meals 

Aches:  Dave - the usual niggles; Julie - trench toes.

Highlight:  Around 6:30am we crossed into Wyoming and left Colorado behind.  Although we do touch Idaho later on, we really only have Wyoming and Montana to go.

Lowlight:  Julie’s misjudged a step trying to cross a boggy creek and her leg went thigh deep into a sucky black morass.  She was not happy.

Pictures: Click here

Map and Position: Click here for Google Map

Journal:

We got going by soon after 6am and shortly thereafter crossed into our third state, Wyoming (see above).

After a bit of reasonable trail and roadwalking, Wyoming showed us it meant business and we had a rollercoaster 10km, steeply up and down, as we followed a mountain range to the northwest through the Huston Park Wilderness, culminating in a debilitatingly steep climb, with lots of blow downs, up to 10500’ on an unnamed mountain (on our maps anyway).

From there, things improved and we enjoyed some lovely hiking along a broad ridge populated by scenic boulder knolls and crags, with great views over the mountains to the north and south, despite some lingering thunderstorms.

The descent from the ridge crossed a number of very attractive and very soggy and boggy meadows, bordered by pine forests.  Along the way, we met our first southbound CDT thruhikers who had started in Canada a few months ago.  We expect to see many more in the coming month.

As we neared the end of our day, and Battle Pass, we met a couple of cowboys on foot, one wearing a pistol on his belt, who asked whether we had seen a couple of horses and a mule.  We hadn't.  They did have a couple of dogs with them, otherwise we don't know how long it would take to find their livestock in the vastness of the mountains we had crossed.

After crossing Battle Pass and a very quiet Hwy 70, we found somewhere to camp by the side of a rough forest road at about 6:30pm and called it a day.