Alpacas at sunset in the Huayhash range. Photo by Bethany Hughes

(Don’t) Hike for Change

By: Bethany ‘Fidgit’ Hughes

Do you remember when people thought the world was going to end in 2012? The idea stemmed from the end of several Mesoamerican calendars. What the frenzy failed to do was what most frenzies fail at: following the information all the way through. The conclusion of the calendars marked transitions in eras, not the end of the world. As I look around now and back over the past few years, the changes and stressors are notable but nothing unexpected if we perceive this as a time of change.

The end of the Mayan and Incan calendars marked the end of protracted cycles. For the Mayans it was one of 7 Ages of Man. For the Incas it was the end of an era ruled by “masculine energy” and the beginning of an era of “feminine energy.” That these transitions happened around December 21 makes sense since both cultures, like many around the world and across the ages, track the solstices. For example, even among the thru-hiking community, we ceremoniously engage in Hike Naked Day every June 21st.

My sources on that aren’t of an academic nature, they come from three years of walking across South America. They are stories and explanations from a grandmother at the foot of Ollantaytambo, Peru who, when I picked up one small rock from her table, carefully selected and insisted I take a second one, to balance their male and female energies. Or from days of walking and talking with chaskis (during the Incan Empire chaskis were runners who carried messages from the capital[s] to the far flung corners of the empire. The men I spoke with were modern day guides and unofficial guardians of segments of what remains of the Qhapaq Ñan) along the 3,000 miles of the Inca Trail we followed. Complemented this with some Googling. That and a lot of miles of walking, thinking, and watching as we strive to create a non-motorized route connecting the Americas.

Because of being such a deeply entrenched footpath after centuries of use and despite being a UNESCO designated World Heritage Site, outside of cities and towns the Qhapaq Nan is most often used as a dump site.

In my final days of completing the Continental Divide Trail last summer, I crossed paths with Dahn, a fellow long traveler. We had been following one another’s international hiking adventures and had been trying to meet up, so of course it didn’t happen until the last 100 miles. In the few hours we walked together, we had one of those conversations that only happen on trail: diving straight into debating ethics and what kind of faces we make at cars on road walks.

I told him about the Incan idea of the calendar shift of power from masculine to feminine. He began to speak passionately about the rise of women, saying it was time for things to change! Frustrated that we haven’t had a woman President in the USA. There was a fervent bounce in his stride as he talked about it. If it’s our time, we need to rise up, RIGHT NOW and seize control.

The best things take time and immense pressure and sudden changes leave beautiful marks.

We sat in front of Saucedo’s Market in Lordsburg taking swigs off a jug of orange juice and eating bananas. I appreciated his vehemence and commitment to pursuing equal rights. I just did not agree with his perception that the change needed to happen abruptly. Rather, I thought our having that conversation was a significant indicator that things are changing. In fact, several times along the CDT I was impressed and inspired by the men I hiked and talked with who were reflecting on their personal roles and seemed genuinely committed to growing and changing, even where it meant questioning familiar structures designed to benefit them. 

In our earliest roles, men were successful as hunters because of: having singular focus, designating a leader, and tracking, attacking, and conquering game. Meanwhile the women were primarily gatherers and were successful because of observing surroundings as a whole, following growth cycles, and working as a collective to gather foods. It does not serve to pick a berry before its time. We grow humans within our wombs. These processes cannot be rushed.

The geopolitical and economic structures today are geared toward the hunter, big dog on top, thinking. We have been raised with scripts of:
“if you want it, grab it.”
“You have to want it more than the next guy.”
“Don’t let anything stand between you and your goals.”

Now more and more of us are looking around and acknowledging that this is not working. Not for our planet and not for us.

Learning bits of Quichua from cholitas in the Cusco region.

This is the end of the era of conquistadors and Victorian explorer thinking. Being first or fastest is less a matter of dominating one another and the land, than it is about expanding the bounds of what we can achieve when we work with each other and the environment. Minorities are stepping forward and making their voices heard in communities and conversations across the board. I am encouraged to begin seeing people of privilege supporting this and amplifying the message. Underneath the ills of our systems, down here at the dirt sitting hiker trash level, many people are making an effort to hear one another and are considering different perspectives. That is a big deal and a good start.

Fidgit (left) and Neon (right) with one of the many families who invited us in and insisted on sharing everything they had.

In the thru-hiking community, we identify by our determination, overcoming challenges, and pushing limits in pursuit of the coveted thru. The current state of human affairs, and in a larger perspective, the planet, are a mighty invitation to rewrite that narrative. Flip flopping because the snow in Colorado says “no.” Taking an alternate or following a reroute because of a forest fire. Changing our plans from a thru-hike to smaller adventures closer to home because of a virulent virus. Nature is pushing us, not to give up, but to reframe our identity to another critical strength: flexibility.

Neon following the Qhapaq Nan along the contour of the Andes.

That same demand to drastically change plans and let go of ego is at play this season with the quarantine efforts which, for many of us, are a direct call to set aside our wants and goals in the interest of others. As the call goes out to stay off the trails to honor our trail communities, thousands of us have made difficult decisions and huge sacrifices in our hiking plans. My travel partner and I made the choice to pull off mid-route in Mexico. Sure, there are yet a few who, for reasons of their own, are out there anyway. Rather than give our collective time and energy to being upset about them, let’s acknowledge and celebrate the fact that the majority of us opted to sacrifice. That means something. 

While the theatrics of social media are particularly alluring when you are frustrated to be stuck staring at a screen instead of climbing a mountain, this is yet another chance to change the narrative by not giving in to the bickering and the bitterness. The information, reasons, and requests to stay off the trail are out there. Hounding each other does not add anything to the conversation.

The ancient road was so well developed and traveled that in many areas beyond the reaches of the cities, the road continues clearly and follow toward beautiful passes. Fidgit (left) Neon (right)

Amidst the mess: politics, climate change, and the global responses to this virus, I see the power shifting from conqueror to community. Let’s not underrate that just because it isn’t happening in the same way or at the same pace as our history books have seen change of power before. Women and minorities in general are not weaker because we approach things differently. We are not passive, fragile, or fearful. We know trauma and physical hardship beyond what any trail can wrought. We are determined, adamant, and we are rising.

A section of road had been obstructed by a landslide and outside help was not coming so the local women organized themselves. There was a lot of laughter and tittering as they worked.

I see a fit for the Incan dichotomy of a shift in the balance between masculine and feminine  energies. I see harbingers of change between lines of thinking and how we approach one another. Do not be ruled by fear nor anger and do not rush but let us hurry into the work of our lives. We may not be thru-hiking at the moment but change is afoot.

“We’re all just walking each other home.” Ram Dass

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Like planning for any thru-hike, we had a few challenges along the way. We were expanding our use of social media and working with sponsors and blogs for the first time. These were all headaches that one could expect but overall things were going as planned. When we first started hearing about COVID-19, our only thought was, hopefully we can get out on trail before this starts to spread. Like most people early on, we thought the trail would be the best place to avoid a sickness- there won’t be many people, we’ll be isolated, and as long as travel isn’t restricted we’ll be fine. 

Isn’t it a bit unfair for us to protect our parents by staying away while possibly infecting someone else’s parents in a far more remote town with far less resources? Is it fair to possibly put the stress of first responders to come drag our stubborn asses out of the Gila National Forest, wasting valuable resources? We decided on the only answer that made sense to those questions. It’s time to postpone. 

While the decision was an incredibly difficult one to make, years of planning, thousands of dollars of gear, giving up our apartment, but in the end it felt like the weight of the world was off our shoulders. The very next day, our last at work due to working at non-essential businesses, we knew we made the right choice when the Appalachian Trail Conservancy, Pacific Crest Trail Association and Continental Divide Trail Coalition came out with recommendations for postponing thru-hikes. 

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The Fastest Three Miles I’ve Ever Hiked

By: Jim Murphy

Age: very late sixties

August 30:

Of course, in the world of forest fires, a week is a lifetime, and things can and do change. After hanging out at a couple of my favorite lakes, Dean and Levale, watching mountain goats, and – this turns out to be important – having encountered no humanoids and therefor having no updated fire info beyond what I got from Gordo and Brian at the cabin a week earlier, I head south on the North Wall Trail, and then east on the Moonlight Peak Trail. This trail is designated by the Forest Service as “Not Regularly Maintained,” which means that they don’t go out and clear all the dead trees that have fallen across it during the winter, and, importantly to this epic, the trail may get a little faint here and there. So I knew what I was buying into when I chose it, but I like these trails nonetheless, as you meet very little foot traffic and virtually never any horses or mules – always a good thing from the backpacker point of view.

Everything is wonderful until I come to a fork in the trail that’s not on the map. After some deliberation, and scouting the right-hand fork for a couple of hundred yards, I decide that the right-hand fork, which seems narrower and just generally of a different character than the left, is probably one of those side trails that go either to a camp used by outfitters, or to a nearby lake (Lake Quiet) that appears on the USFS map (not on the map above). I remember thinking that Yogi Berra, one of my heroes, wrote a book entitled When You Come to a Fork in the Road, Take It!, but that advice didn’t really help me much at that particular point.

I continue along the left fork for what seems in retrospect to have been upwards of an hour. I’m stepping over some deadfall, but as I say, that’s to be expected on a trail that isn’t regularly maintained, so I keep going. Eventually, the deadfall gets ridiculous, the trail goes from faint to non-existent, and I realize that I’ve taken a wrong turn – as I so often have in my life – but this time in the literal rather than figurative sense. Even Robert Frost probably didn’t contemplate the kind of jackpot I’d just gotten myself into when he talked about the road not taken.

I can hear you thinking at this point, “Why didn’t he just backtrack to the fork in the trail?” I would have, except that I’d stayed with this phantom trail for so long, continuing on in the direction that the terrain suggested the trail ought to be, that I couldn’t find the trail when I decided to turn back. Life is hard, but it’s harder when you’re dumb.

So what to do? The creeks and rivers don’t show on the above map, but I was in country that I knew drained in an easterly direction into the North Fork of the Sun River, the trail next to the North Fork being part of my planned route. So, I just find some water and follow the flow down to the North Fork, which was where the Moonlight Peak trail would have taken me if I hadn’t been dumb enough to lose it, right? Easier done on a map than on the ground. I find a very small creek and take off, cross-country, toward the North Fork (Point “A” on the map), not at all clear as to how far away that is. My route, such as it was, is designated on the above map by the blue line; the red line is the actual trail, which I should have still been on. I spend the rest of the day bushwhacking through pretty dense understory, keeping the little creek within hearing, if not always in sight, eventually camping for the night when I run out of daylight.

Photo by Jim Murphy

August 31:

I get up and get back at it, thinking how much more of this can there be? I eventually come out of the woods into the old (1988) burn that has left mile upon mile of waist-high deadfall (large trees, often stacked two and three high) stretching out to the horizon. I do about half a day of this and it’s kicking my butt, climbing over this stuff every fifteen or twenty feet – and it still stretches out to the horizon. At this point I think to myself, “I know the North Fork runs due north/south for several miles, and if I just head east, I’ve got to run into it. Enough of this following the water. Whatever the terrain is like between here and the North Fork, it can’t be any worse than this deadfall.” So I turn left, strike out to the east. The terrain is in fact much easier and I hit the river at Point “A” a little before sundown.

September 1:

I spend the whole day flat on my back, recovering from the past couple of days, and thinking that the North Fork Trail is just across the river (it was) and that I’m good to go once I get on it and head north – that my ordeal is over. Sure, there’s smoke everywhere, but during fire season, there is often smoke everywhere in the Bob, often from fires elsewhere in the state, or even from out of state. I don’t see any plumes of smoke, so I figure I’m cool to head north and back toward my car. The thought crosses my mind that maybe I should hike south to the trail junction (Point “B”) that I would have come through had I stayed on the Moonlight Peak Trail, and check for a possible fire closure notice. No way to be sure how far north of that junction I am, but I’m thinking, dead reckoning, we’re probably talking about a mile or so. Just on the chance that a fire nobody seemed panicked about last time I talked to anyone was now closing trails several drainages away from its start.

September 2:

Nahhhh! Too tired to hike that far out of my way just to check. I head out northbound toward Sun River Pass (Point “E”), passing several trail junctions that do not have closure signs posted on the signposts, which tells me that this trail is not in fact closed and that I made the right call in not hiking an unnecessary mile or so south to check. I run out of energy (still tired from the bushwhacking) and daylight at Point “C,” where I camp for the night.

September 3:

After my usual very late start, leisurely breakfast, slow, methodical packing up, I continue north in search of closure signs – or telltale smoke plumes – and finding neither, I come over Sun River Pass (no closure notice) and come to a campsite on the banks of Bowl Creek (Point “D”) that I had visited several years earlier. I drop my pack and hang my food, rather than leave it unattended on the ground while I check the next couple of trail junctions for closure signs. The first was the junction of the Bowl Creek Trail, which would take me east and up over Teton Pass in the event that the route back to my car at Swift Dam was closed. No closure sign at the Bowl Creek junction. I then proceed in a slightly northwesterly direction towards the junction of the Bowl Creek Trail and Trail 479, which heads north and which I’m hoping to follow back to Swift Dam. I hike a couple of hundred yards, come around a bend in the trail and see this about fifty feet out in front of me:

Photo by Jim Murphy

“Well,” I think to myself, “I guess this probably qualifies as a trail closure notice,” even if the Forest Service hasn’t posted one at any of the trail junctions I’ve passed.

I head back to the campsite, pack up and head back up toward Sun River Pass, roughly a mile and a half away, arriving there towards dark. As I said, I got a late start that day and didn’t cover a lot of miles in either direction. I get a few hundred yards past the pass and decide that I’m probably far enough away to safely camp rather than continue hiking in the dark, which is generally considered to be dangerous. I find a flat spot near the trail, set up my tent and try to relax and get to sleep.

I do a few Sudoku puzzles by the light of my headlamp and finally start to feel drowsy. By the time I turn off the headlamp, it’s full dark and I look out the left, i.e., south, side of my tent and the entire southwestern horizon is glowing bright orange. I think to myself, “I sure hope this is just a particularly dramatic sunset.”

No such luck. I get out of the tent, walk a little ways over to a break in the timber and see flames off in the distance. Unfortunately, having very little experience – well, actually none – observing forest fires at night, or in the daytime, for that matter, I am unable to gauge whether these are small flames fairly close by or large flames farther away. In either case, I decide, it looks as if I’m not done hiking for the day after all.

So, for the third time that day, I pack up and hit the trail. The rule against hiking at night suddenly didn’t seem as important as the rule against laying there in your tent doing nothing while a forest fire appears to be surrounding your camp. I strap on the headlamp and head south on the North Fork Trail, which runs pretty much straight north/south. The only problem with this move is that the brightest part of the fire continues to be almost due south, i.e., just a couple of compass points off of straight ahead of me. I’m still unable to judge just how far away it is, but my thinking is that I know I have fire behind me, so my only real option here is to head south as fast as I can in hopes of getting past the fire ahead of me before it burns across the trail. At that point, my only options would be to bushwhack east up a ridge in the dark – not an attractive prospect.

I remind myself that people make very poor, often fatal, decisions when they panic in what they perceive to be survival situations, so, keeping as calm as I can, I continue hiking what was the fastest three miles I’ve ever done with a backpack, I promise you. Knowing that a broken, or even badly sprained, ankle could very possibly be a death sentence, I refrained from running, but I was definitely setting a personal speed record nonetheless. I don’t carry a watch in the wilderness, so I didn’t time it, but I was moving faster than I ever did when I first started hiking the Bob twenty-five years ago.

But, after what seemed, at least an hour on the trail, the fire still looked to be an indeterminable distance away and still almost directly ahead of me. Am I going to be able to head it off and get past it before it burns across the trail and I’m trapped with fire ahead and behind? There doesn’t seem to be any other option than continuing south; either it hasn’t gotten to the trail and I’ll be able to get past it, or it will have gotten to the trail and . . . . I decide to visualize the former rather than the latter, which I’ll try to cope with if and when.

Oh, yeah. Did I mention that the wind was now blowing about 20mph from the west, i.e., from behind the fire and towards the trail? Didn’t help my anxiety level.

I remember thinking, “Hey, I could win a Darwin Award for this.” Then, “Damn, I don’t have a thing to wear to the awards ceremony . . . . No. Wait. The recipients don’t have to worry about that, do they?” I also thought about the possibility of having to head up that ridge to the east and remembered the smokejumpers that Norman Maclean wrote about in Young Men and Fire, all of them forty or forty-five years younger than me, who didn’t make it safely up the ridge. But, hey, I thought, if I do live to write about this, there’s my title, right? Old Men and Fire. Sorry, Mr. Maclean, hope you wouldn’t have minded. No, I quickly realize, that kind of levity would be pretty inappropriate, given the fate of those smokejumpers.

I also remember thinking that I would ultimately like to have my ashes scattered in the Bob Marshall Wilderness, but just maybe not tonight.

At long last, I start coming abreast of the fire, off to my right. For the next quarter mile or so, the ridgeline a few hundred yards away is lit up with sparkly little fires consistent with the main fire having burned past it. Still impossible for a novice to judge, at night, just how far away, but it’s closer than I wanted to be. That I can tell you, to quote a well-known American.

By the time I get up abreast of the intense flames (Point “F”), they appear to be two to three hundred yards away. But, again, this was an uneducated guess, and even if I’d had a tape measure with me . . . . So let’s just say they were close. I was more focused on having actually won the race and now putting as much distance between me and the fire that was finally growing fainter behind me. My little point-and-shoot camera was, of course, not designed for nighttime photography and really couldn’t do justice to what I was actually seeing.

Photo by Jim Murphy

It was dated September 1, when I had been laying up all day a mile or so north, recuperating from my two days of bushwhacking through the dense timber and then climbing over a mile or two of deadfall. It should be noted that, had I not lost the trail, I would very likely have come through this spot on the 31st, possibly even the 30th, and could have very well had this very same adventure anyway. That’s what the Forest Service means when they talk about traveling at your own risk.

Well, this has run a lot longer than the 140 characters that people are used to these days, so I’ll wrap it up here rather than going on to describe: the look on the Forest Service guy’s face when he rode up out the woods and found me camped on Wrong Creek, just a little ways from the closure notice; the bowhunters that offered me a ride on one of their spare horses when they found me at the foot of the pass – the pass that the Forest Service guy said I had to get over ASAP; how the 16-year-old mare they put me on came close to laying down and dying on the way up the pass, so I ended up walking anyway; and how these bowhunters, Andy and Dustin from Ronan, bought me dinner in Choteau (my wallet was in my car) and then drove in excess of a hundred miles out of their way to drop me at my car. I sent Andy a check for the dinner and all the extra diesel he burned, and he refused to cash it. One of the things I love about spending so much time in the wilderness is that the people you meet are (almost) always at their best. These guys really lived up to that.

Andy and Dustin.
Photo by Jim Murphy

Final thoughts: In hindsight, some of the choices I made don’t look as good now as they did at the time I made them, but . . . . Woulda, Coulda, Shoulda, If, right? For one thing, it’s probably a good idea to move a little more quickly through the wilderness when there is fire anywhere in the general vicinity, especially if you’re going to be completely out of touch – and uninformed – for a week or more, as I make a point of trying to be. My mantra has always been that the point is to be in the wilderness, not to get through it, and having virtually unlimited time, I tend to dawdle at places like Dean Lake:

Dean Lake.
Photo by Jim Murphy

Needless to say, that philosophy didn’t serve me well on this trip. I wish my mental coin flip at that unmapped fork in the trail had come up the other way, but, based on my extensive hiking experience, I really thought I’d picked the correct fork. Staying with that choice to the point where I couldn’t find it any longer when I finally decided to backtrack, is, of course, entirely on me. Won’t be doing that again.

I also, it is now abundantly clear, should have done that one-mile or so hike in the opposite direction to check for a closure sign at the junction of Trail 108 at Wrong Creek, instead of relying on the presence – or absence – of closure signs at junctions on my way north. As Joe Woodhead, the Forest Service fire guy so patiently explained, once the Forest Service has closed an area, there’s no point in putting up more signs within the closure, because – Duh!  – people aren’t supposed to be there to see them in the first place!!!!

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Nevertheless, that is exactly the celebration of marriage that my husband Mike and I chose to partake in during the summer of 2018. Having met for the first time and beginning our relationship while both thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail in 2015, we determined that another trip along the length of the U.S. would be the perfect way for us to begin our marriage as well. So in June 2018, we moved all of our belongings into storage, left our home in Richmond, Virginia, and started a thru-hike on the Continental Divide Trail. We had hiked the AT northbound and would have likely considered doing the same for our second long trail, but we didn’t complete our Masters degrees in Richmond until late May, so heading southbound on the CDT was our only option. Looking back, we could not have chosen a better direction for this incredibly unique trail and would not have had it any other way.  

As our honeymoon hike progressed, we continued to experience such a variety of rewarding adventures and unrelenting obstacles. The CDT is truly a rollercoaster of a trail, in terms of enjoyment and trail quality. Some days, you’re navigating swollen rivers, getting lost from confusing or nonexistent directions, and climbing over or around miles of blown down trees (see: the Bob Marshall Wilderness). Then the next, you’re strolling up rolling, grassy hills where the trail is perfectly clear, there are incredible views in every single direction, and you have perfect, flat ground on which to set up your tent and watch a wildfire of a sunset streak across the sky while wondering how you got so lucky (see: the Montana/Idaho border).

One of the grand things about the CDT is the variety of landscapes and ecosystems through which you travel. I’m sure most others who have hiked this path would agree that it encompasses some of the most jaw-dropping scenery you could find anywhere: Glacier National Park, the Anaconda-Pintler Wilderness, the section between Leadore, Idaho, and Lima, Montana, that in my opinion, is about the most underrated stretch of the entire trail. Yellowstone, the Tetons—if you can find a way to do them, DO THEM—and oh my breathtaking goodness, the Wind River Range. Rocky Mountain National Park, the shared experience with Colorado Trail hikers through the Collegiates, and obviously the grandeur (and imminent threat of winter) of the San Juans. The bright yellow Aspens of northern New Mexico, the freezing water and towering canyons of the Gila River, and even down to the vibrancy of the desert and the unique sense of life and beauty only found in the Bootheel. There is truly nothing else I’ve found quite like the diversity that this trail offers, and it will forever be a glimmer of awe and wonder as I dream about this part of my past. 

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