Day: 081
Date: Friday, 26 July 2024
Start: Bison Basin Road
Finish: Sweetwater River
Daily Kilometres: 40.7
GPX Track: Click here for Julie’s Strava & Photos
Total Kilometres: 2392.4
Weather: Mild to warm and partly sunny with a strong wind for much of the day.
Accommodation: Tent
Nutrition:
Breakfast: Pop tarts/Muesli
Lunch: Snacks/Trail mix
Dinner: Chicken & rice
Aches: Dave - the usual niggles including the new ones; Julie - nothing reported.
Highlight: Nothing in particular.
Lowlight: Nothing in particular.
Pictures: Click here
Map and Position: Click here for Google Map
Journal:
We were woken at 3:30am by the sound of a strong wind buffeting the tent. It was too noisy to go back to sleep and Dave feared the tent could be damaged if it got any stronger, so we got up at 3:45am and packed up camp. By the time we had finished the wind had abated a little but, an hour later, it became very strong again and continued into the early afternoon.
Although Dave was complaining about lack of sleep and fatigue from yesterday, one advantage of the early start was that it meant we should comfortably be able to cover the 39km+ we hoped for the day, giving us only about 20km tomorrow morning into the tiny village of Atlantic City where we have a B&B booked for the night.
We hiked using our headlamps for the first hour or so, backed by a beautiful sunrise gradually illuminating the sagebrush plain in front of us. The day seemed a repeat of yesterday in that, after a few kilometres, we spent the rest of the morning gradually climbing through a series of valleys, this time to about 7500’. The CDT followed a complicated course, as was the case yesterday, connecting up a series of unused 4WD tracks that took it in the desired direction. It would have been hard to follow on a hardcopy map, but our navigation app proved up to the task.
Water availability was again an issue, and we planned our day and breaks around the few water sources, which we generally shared with the few cattle we saw and, later, a herd of wild horses with a number of foals.
We crossed a high treeless plain with some attractive rocky outcrops for much of the afternoon and, as some small trailside markers told us, we were following the route of the famed Oregon and California Trails used by wagon trains taking settlers west in the 19th Century. What a trip that must have been, and what a forlorn and depressing sight the Great Divide Basin must have been to those optimistic pioneers. It really was a lot of nothing, though the distant snow-patched Wind River Range became a feature of our afternoon view.
Around 4pm we began a steady descent along a better gravel road, meeting an English couple mountain-biking south along the Great Divide MTB route, the first people we had seen all day. After a bit of gnarly single-track we reached the Sweetwater River and camped near its banks at around 5:30pm.
We had an early night, looking forward to showers, laundry, soft beds and some junk food tomorrow, after four very solid days across the Basin.
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