Day 103 - Continental Divide Trail - Centennial Mountains Wilderness to Kay Creek

Day: 103

Date: Saturday, 17 August 2024

Start:  Centennial Mountains Wilderness

Finish:  Kay Creek

Daily Kilometres:  40.0

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

Total Kilometres:  3027.2

Weather:  Cool early then mild and mostly sunny.

Accommodation:  Tent

Nutrition:

  Breakfast:  Pop tarts/Muesli

  Lunch:  Trail mix

  Dinner:  Rehydrated meals 

Aches:  Dave the usual niggles; Julie - nothing reported.

Highlight:  From mid-morning until early afternoon we were hiking at 9000’-9500’ above the treeline with never-ending and expansive views in all directions on a perfect day.

Lowlight:  Much of the trail today was very narrow, uneven underfoot, and through low overhanging vegetation meaning we had to watch where we were placing our feet rather than enjoying the views as much as we would have liked.

Pictures: Click here

Map and Position: Click here for Google Map

Journal:

We were later getting away this morning because Dave was grappling with the relacing his disintegrating boots and we had trouble extracting a tent peg which had been inadvertently hammered into a tree root last night while setting up the tent.  Fortunately, we have new footwear waiting for us at our next town and we did manage to eventually extract the tent peg without breaking it.

It was 6:45am by the time we started hiking.  The CDT climbed steadily on difficult trail from about 8000’, where we were camped, to over 9500’, but the views were magnificent and we could see vast distances to the plains below on both the Idaho and Montana sides of the mountain range we were following.  There were long stretches where we followed the contours giving us dress-circle views.

In the early afternoon we began descending, spending more time in the pine forests and grassy meadows, and stopped for our dinner break around 4:30pm at the Aldous Lake Trailhead (7000’) where there was a welcome and convenient picnic table next to a stream.

After dinner, we hiked another 8km, mainly through forest and rocky areas, and climbed to a saddle at 8400’ where we camped as the sun was setting, and the moon was rising, soon after 8pm.

We only saw five other people today, all of them southbound CDT thru-hikers, three of them together, so felt like we had the mountains and views to ourselves.