Tag Continental Divide Trail

National Trails: Where Am I?

Reg Spittle Leave a comment

Sue’s camera caught me on two American national trails during the past week. In the top photo, the trail follows, for a spell, an historic American highway. Wanna take a guess?

The highway is Route 66; in Grants, New Mexico, the 3,200-mile Continental Divide Trail is the side of the famous road. For the photo, I grabbed Sue’s trekking poles for the (geeky?) pose. I took several steps and announced, ”I walked the CDT!”

In the bottom two photos, the path is the Arizona Trail, which runs 800 miles from the Mexican border to Utah. We walked from just south of Flagstaff, Arizona to Fisher Point, an eight-mile out and back that rewarded us with a view of Walnut Canyon from the mountaintop in the bottom picture.

We encountered no thru hikers because the locations are not in places where thru trekkers typically travel during springtime.

The pair of paths are two of America’s 11 national scenic trails. The system also includes 19 historic trails and 1,300 recreation trails.

At 21, They Gambled Against the Odds

Reg Spittle Leave a comment

Impossible? Not for Jackson Parell and Sammy Potter.

Jackson Parell and Sammy Potter at the Appalachian Trail terminus.

In 2021, the twenty-one-year-olds became the youngest to complete thru-hiking’s triple crown during a calendar year. They are the eleventh and twelfth hikers to have conquered the Appalachian Trail, the Continental Divide Trail, and the Pacific Crest Trail in the same year.

They went through 12 pair of shoes each as they climbed and descended more than a million feet in elevation over 295 days.

Thanks to Backpacker, you can hear them describe the highs and lows of their nearly 8,000-mile journey on the podcast series Impossible Odds. Click on the link to get to know the pair of Stanford students, who are back at school—as roommates.