On the CDT

I finally made it to the CDT. I have spent the first two weeks sick and lost most of the time. I’m really happy to have a GPS and wouldn’t want to do this trail without one.

The solitude and quiet on this trail have been great. It’s like having the whole world to my self. I’m hiking slow and not at all worried about finishing. What I don’t get this year I will get another year. I’m just enjoying the “trail”. I say “trail” cause it’s not really a trail like the PCT and the AT are. You just sort pick a route, try to follow it and if you get lost just pick a direction and follow that.

I might start hiking south after the snow melts because I’m having a really hard time following Jim Wolfs’ guides going north.

The water is the worst I have ever drank. Green stagnate cow troughs with feathers and bugs floating in it. The water is thick like there is a lot of saliva in it.

GPS’s and the CDT

Jason, 2003 thru-hiker, used a Garmin Vista. He was able to delete the maps that came with it, freeing up enough space to put ALL the maps for the CDT in it. He carried it in a little case attached to his backpacking strap. He says if you don’t bring a GPS with all the maps in it that you will be lost for days at a time.

I called Garmin and they said you couldn’t delete the basemap it comes with so I bought a Garmin 60c with 56 megs of memory just to be sure I would have enough memory. I was able to store all of the maps for the trail plus a pretty big corridor around the trail and still had lots of room to spare. I used the Garmin MapSource CD ROM (USA TOPO). Jason sent me his list of what maps he used off of Garmin’s Mapsourse Topo USA CD. list of maps to download into your GPS

2003 thru-hiker, James sent me his list of waypoints. If you download all the waypoints to your GPS it becomes pretty clear what maps you will need. Here is a link to his waypoints http://skylab.org/~crow/blog/gps/jamescdt03.wpt. He deleted some to make room for the final stretch so here is his final list. http://skylab.org/~crow/blog/gps/cdtfinal.wpt. They are in Garmin PCX5 format. They actually were in Mallegen format when I got them, so they needed to be converted by using this GPSBabel program. http://gpsbabel.sourceforge.net/. Using this program you can convert waypoints into what ever format you need them to be in. James, has them already in Magellan format at his site http://cdt2003.info/how.htm

Town Guide

The town guide continunes to be updated almost daily as I find new information.

I combined sources to make a more complete town guide. Town Guide

The sources are Mike and Kam’s Shop as you go guide , Tom Bombaci’s New Mexico guide, Gottago’s Bandana resuply page, info gleened for the CDT mailing list, and James’ resuply data.

This page list trail towns, the services they provide and other important information. It is also is an automatic mailing label generator. http://www.fallingwater.com/cdt
He says he is updating this and the newest updates will be at http://www.sixmoondesigns.com/cdt/

Maps

Thru-hiker, Jonathan Ley makes a CD that has all the maps of the CDT. You print them out on your home computer. They have been updated for 2004 and now include a way to use a GPS with them. The route is marked on the maps along with alternate routes. He also includes notes.
http://www.phlumf.com./cdt/cdtmaps.htm

To get BLM state maps call these numbers.

Montana http://www.mt.blm.gov/faq/maps/ Phone: (406) 896-5000

Idaho http://www.id.blm.gov/Phone: 208-373-4000

Wyoming http://www.wy.blm.gov/ Phone: 307-775-6256

Colorado http://www.co.blm.gov/mapinfo/mapfaq.htm Phone:(303) 239-3600

New Mexico http://www.nm.blm.gov/ Phone:(505) 438-7400