The first two people I met on the Continental Divide Trail were a German man and his wife in southern New Mexico in April.  They had flown from Germany to El Paso the day before.  Three days later in central New Mexico I met three men, one from California, one from Oregon, and one from Germany.  Four days later I met four young men at Ghost Ranch in northern New Mexico hiking toward the Canadian border, one from France and three from Israel.  Of the first nine people I met, seven were foreigners.  I was so astounded by this small sample that I called Theresa Martinez, Continental Divide Trail Coordinator for Colorado and Wyoming, based in Golden, Colorado.  She wasn’t surprised.  “Over half of the thru-hikers on the CDT are foreigners,” she told me.

This was just my first surprise when I arrived from Florida to do six weeks of day-hikes on the CDT, but here is another.  The 2,100 mile AT has 25,000 members; the 3,100 mile CDT has 800 to 1,000.  Explaining this is not easy.  As one might imagine, the trail is poorly maintained.  One of its foreign friends had this to say, “The trail in general has a marking problem.  There is not even one section we can say that is fully marked.  The thing is that even if the trail is marked, it is not consistent nor continues for more than a few dozen miles.”  He was not out to bad-mouth the trail because he added, “The scenery was amazing; green meadows, crystal blue water and abundant wildlife.”  “First of all the great thing about the long trail is the diversity in scenery and the people along the way.”  “It is hard to decide on one specific place that was the most beautiful, all of them were gorgeous (really!!.)”

I have hiked the AT, the Florida Trail, the Sierras, the High Uintas, the Bitterroot, the Beartooth and a dozen other places, but I think the CDT when properly marked and mapped might surpass them all in diversity and grandeur.  Let me put it another way; the CDT and the CDT Alliance have no where to go but up.

Up it will go.  I say that because of the staff I met and talked to from Hachita, New Mexico, to Gunsight Pass, Glacier National Park.  They are fully cognizant of the treasure placed in their care, and they are fully capable of taking the CDT where it needs to go.

Looking ahead, here are some tasks:

• Market the trail to Japanese, Western European and Israeli Trail clubs (I’ll commit to give two programs to the Club Alpin Francais next June.)

• At home, market the CDT in Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Colorado Springs, Denver, Missoula and Helena for starters.  The CDT Alliance should have 5,000 members in the greater Denver area alone.  (Offering well-thought-out programs to outing clubs is probably the most cost-effective option open.)

• Identify trail friends in the BLM and USFS.  Explain that some pressure on the system will be needed to change attitudes about how they do things.  Ask them to stand by you.

• Apply the pressure.  Too many in the BLM and the USFS think this trail is theirs and that too many hikers will ruin it.  (Let me take a few of them to the French Alps.  I’m serious.  We don’t know what high use is.  I can’t see that the resource or experience suffers.)

There is a culture in the Rockies that Uncle has all this free land and all you have to do is enjoy it freely.  The work ethic must catch on here as it has on both coasts.  Citizens need to maintain trails.  Authority accrues to those who do the work, know the resource intimately and press their views.

• Promote Trail Towns that in turn provide for the needs of hikers.  Here are some naturals: Lordsburg, New Mexico; Cuba, New Mexico; Grants and Pie Town, New Mexico; Salida, Colorado; Granby (Grand Lake), Colorado; Rollins, Wyoming; West Yellowstone, Wyoming; Butte, Montana; Helena, Montana.  (There is a healthy co-dependent relationship in the east between trail towns and hikers that proves it works for both.)  The Chamber of Commerce should help with this effort.  Hikers don’t spend a ton of money, but they don’t make much of an impact either.

I arrived at Glacier National Park in mid-afternoon, the fourth of July, and looked up the Back Country Office.  This office issues permits to sleep at remote campsites within the park.  For weeks I had had two ideas in my mind.  One, I would find the wildflowers that thus far on the trip had eluded me and, two, I would photograph the sunrise at Logan Pass on Going to the Sun Road that bisects the park at 6,646 feet.

Number two was in trouble right away.  The road was closed each night from 9 PM to 7 AM for repairs.  The sun rose at 5:40 on the 4^th.  Then it dawned on me that the next day was a holiday.  The road crew shouldn’t be working.  But the weather report was for rain on that day, and clearing the next.  I had no choice.  I had to go the next day, rain or shine.

So I set the alarm for 2:30, left the RV at 3:15 and for the next two hours drove up hill on a winding road through the dark and the rain.  What a bad idea.  I could have been nestled in a warm down bag.

I pulled into the vacant parking lot at the visitor center at 5:00, just as the sky was lightening.  I dropped the seat back and dozed.  Around 5:30 I was aware that the rain had stopped.  Well, why not get out and put the camera on the tripod?

About 5:50 I looked up from my camera and saw a warm glow streaming in the valley from the east.  I couldn’t believe it.  I picked up the tripod and raced to the far end of the parking lot to get asphalt out of the picture and may have gotten a dramatic photograph.  In two or three minutes the dawn light was gone.

Later in the day I drove down the east side of the pass about five miles, parked at Gunsight Pass and walked out the CDT to Reynolds Campground and beyond.  Only when I got back to the truck at the end of the day did it start to rain again.

On Tuesday, I had the truck serviced for the long drive down the Pacific Coast in September to follow the Pacific Crest Trail, and then my journey home, and tended to other business.  On Wednesday I went back out to day-hike with Shannon Freix, trail coordinator for the Continental Divide Trail Alliance.  I told Shannon my need for wildflower photographs, and she suggested we try a road off Highway 2 that went south into the Badger Forest District instead of north into the park.  We hit pay dirt.  For the first time since April I was surrounded with a plethora of wildflowers: lupine, Indian paint brush, arnica, penstemon, potentilla, and wallflower, to name just a few.

Then we went down into East Glacier Park and had lunch at Two Medicine Lake.  In the afternoon we climbed toward Scenic Peak and again found abundant wildflowers along the trail, a real score, and a great way to end a journey up the Continental Divide Trail.

Here is the grandest scene I know of in the U.S. Park System.  Walk in the entrance of the Jackson Lake Lodge in the Tetons and mount the long flight of steps in front of you to the main lobby.  As you do, windows three stories high come into view straight ahead of you.  At the top of the steps you are drawn across the lobby where you gaze at the Teton Range.  It’s staggering.  If the weather is fine, you will immediately walk outside for a better view.  No where else in the country do mountains rise so sharply and so high above the surrounding plain.

From the Tetons I drove directly north into Yellowstone, crossing the Divide near Grant Village, and taking the easterly route around to Gardner, Montana, and then north to Livingston to share an evening meal with family friends.  From there I doubled back south to sample the CDT at Red Rock Pass and moved the RV west to Beaver Dam Campground in the National Forest off I-15 in order to hike north in the afternoon from Chief Joseph Pass.

Here is a page from my journal describing the Forest Service Campground at Beaver Dam:

“Back at the Forest Service’s Beaver Dam Campground, a flycatcher came calling with very distinctive notes.  Sibley describes the song as, “Quick, three beers”, an olive-sided flycatcher.  I can’t remember when I saw one last.  It is after nine.  Light is fading fast.  A robin sings, but his notes are challenged by Country Western music.  The nearest RV is at least 400’ away, but I can almost hear the words.  The family with the sound box can’t possibly hear the robin.  How sad that they come here and choose not to hear.  ATVs, motorized bikes and cars are the only things I see moving on the graded road and forest roads that splinter off it.  This is my second night.  I counted ten RVs and yet I have seen no one walk.  I have seen no one with a field guide, no one taking a picture of a scene in nature while I have been here.  Last night I heard voices and music until 12:30 when I fell off to sleep.”

RVers can further separate themselves from nature by buying a “toy hauler.”  This is an RV with a compartment in the rear for large toys.  Instead of a pair of binoculars, some field guides, a pair of hiking boots, a kayak or a fly rod, the owner can more easily bring into the woods, motorized trail bikes, ATVs, even a jeep, vehicles that go fast, burn fuel and make noise.  We have a school problem dealing with over-stimulated students.  But I think we have a problem with over-stimulated adults as well.  Nature, the last environment for reflection and contemplation, is in danger of being consumed by feverish activity.

At long last, tomorrow I will be in Whitefish on the doorstep of Glacier National Park.

I have friends who ski outside Steamboat Springs.  I had never been there, but it’s on the way to Buffalo Pass in the Zirkel Mountains.  An attractive town, neat and prosperous, it is also welcoming.  It’s out in the middle of nowhere, but so is Aspen.  I drove east out of town toward Buffalo Pass and the Continental Divide.  I envisioned a ridge line with sweeping vistas to the right and left as I hiked north.  Instead, I found a locked gate across a public right-of-way after ten plus miles of graded road.  I was irked.  Instead of turning around, I shouldered my tripod and decided to hike up hill on the road, perhaps reaching the pass.

In less than an hour I came upon the problem.  Snow covered the road as far as I could see.  Glacier lilies were in bloom where the snow had melted.  Pine siskins were about, too.  And a Cassin’s finch was singing.  I just made the best of it, but snow was once again blocking my way.  This was a pass, not a mountain top….and it was June 21!

I am not much of a history buff, but if there is a dollop of adventure in the events, I can get excited.  Lewis & Clark’s journal, Shackleton’s story in Endurance, the history of the Khyber Pass, I can get just as caught up in these as I did South Pass, which I visited next.  I took US Hwy 287 north out of Rawlins.  When it angled west, the view turned dramatic: undulating hills with the snowy peaks of the Wind River Range directly ahead of me in the distance.

Those fur traders and prospectors who followed Lewis & Clark didn’t want to deal with the Rocky Mountains.  If they went very far south, the rivers were too swift, deep and wide: the Colorado, the Green, the Rio Grande.  But in 1812 an Indian guide led Robert Stuart with the Columbia Fur Co. around the south end of the Wind River Range.  Although it was very much north in central Wyoming, the spot was still south of the other options.  So it was immediately known as South Pass.

When the great western emigration began, the California Trail, the Oregon Trail, the Mormon Trail and the Pony Express all went through South Pass, the only common point for each.  Upwards of 300,000 souls, some with wagons, some with stock, some with only barrows, passed this way between 1812 and 1869 when the transcontinental railroad was completed.

The Continental Divide and the Continental Divide Trail both traverse this spot.

In 1867 when gold was discovered nearby, a town of 2,000 sprung up, and South Pass City bloomed briefly, until 1875 when the mineral played out.  Old buildings have been renovated and personal effects set in place by the Wyoming Division of Parks.  For $4 you can stroll along “Main Street.”  Commemorative “tombstones” identify many of the buildings that no longer exist.  I walked out of town on the CDT.

After doubling back to US Hwy 287, I continued north just past a spot on the map marked Dubois.  Five miles up a gravel road landed me at Brooks Lake Campground.  Thank you, Teresa Martinez.   I never would have found this without you.  The lake is a jewel; the setting is a panorama of sheer mountains.  My first day there I took a detour off the CDT to search for Jade Lake, which I didn’t find.  It didn’t matter.  I took a sun bath in front of a dramatic escarpment and then dropped back down to the campground.

By the way, the drive from Dubois to Grand Teton National Park on Hwy 287 gets on that short list of best wild and scenic highways.

Next:  Through Yellowstone and into Montana and the terminus of the CDT.

From the unforgettable Maroon Bells Wilderness, I dropped down to Denver to take the staff of Big City Mountaineers to lunch and then went west of I-70 to Golden to see Teresa Martinez with the Continental Divide Trail Alliance.  She knew I was coming to ask for day-hike recommendations on the CDT in Colorado and Wyoming.  She and her assistant Josh had print-outs ready for me, and I followed her recommendations scrupulously.

I took I-40 north to Berthoud Pass where I headed east and uphill on the CDT.  In an hour I was above tree line and had reached a ridge that looked out over Ethel Lake and a grand valley to the east.  To avoid an up-slope wind, I dropped down just a few yards to the west and stretched out on the tundra, first to doze…..and then to nap.  It was a glorious afternoon.

From there I worked my way north on US 40 and then north on CO 34 and entered Rocky Mountain National Park to hike the Green Mountain Trail.  As I was leaving the parking lot, I noticed a park ranger hefting a pack.  His name is Theron Daniel.  He was also out for the day, so we fell in step.  I immediately had questions about the dead and dying forest all around us.

We in the east don’t realize it, but the West (I mean the Rockies) is being eaten alive.  Pine bark beetles are doing the damage.  They are partial to lodgepole pine.  This species is found from Alaska to Mexico and are the dominant tree in Yellowstone.  On a dry slope the devastation can be 100%.  In a wet meadow a tree has a chance.  If it can produce an abundant flow of sap, it can sometimes repel the beetle with this flow as it is trying to burrow in.  Actually, a fungus carried by the beetle is what kills the tree.  Virtually all my photographs have dead trees in them.

A fabulous postcard photograph awaited us when we reached a meadow, my destination for the day.  A herd of elk, my first sighting of the trip, were grazing in the open.  A snow-flecked mountain provided a stunning backdrop.  My camera, which I switched on in the morning to witness the LCD come alive, refused to fire.  (I always take at least two camera bodies on a trip, but only one on each hike.)  I noticed “low battery.”  So I opened the camera to change batteries and found that one had leaked badly.  With my knife I scraped away the corrosion at the contact points.  But, alas, I couldn’t get the camera to fire.  A real photographic calamity.

Better trips ahead:  Buffalo Pass, South Pass “City,” and Brooks Lake before entering Montana.

The sailor returns

 I left my laptop and other worldly possessions at Hi Country RV Storage, Santa Fe, on May 13, and took the “Rail Runner” commuter train to an Albuquerque flight to Jacksonville.  From St. Augustine I sailed to Great Abaco to pursue the Bahama parrot while snows melted in the high country along the Continental Divide Trail from northern New Mexico to northern Colorado.  (See my blog of May 25.)

The story of the Bahama parrot is quite remarkable, but telling it in pictures will be tough.  A race of the Cuban parrot, only on Great Abaco does it have the bizarre habit of nesting deep in limestone cavities in the ground.  That’s an ideal place for eggs or young birds when lightning strikes from violent summer storms send fires sweeping through the pine woods or when hurricanes roar through the Bahamas.  Oddly, the only other place this bird is found is Great Inagua, where it does not nest in the ground.

Researchers from Florida State University are studying the parrot and also looking for ways to protect it from a nemesis unknown to it historically, feral cats.  Over 20 nests out of 75 were plundered by cats last year.  When the researchers locate new nests, they set GPS coordinates so they can return to monitor them.

This work is exhausting.  Thinly-needled, sparsely-scattered Caribbean pine provided us with little shade from the blazing tropical sun.  Poisonwood, as vicious as poison ivy, is the dominant under-story plant, so the work is also treacherous.

We visited a dozen nests while I was there in late May.  Only three had eggs, a late start to the nesting season, probably caused by a cold and protracted “winter” in the Bahamas.  I’ll take the next few months to see if I can put this project together for next summer.

I returned to St. Augustine on June 8.  (If I have time, I’ll write up my sailing journey to and from Abaco and post it.)  That gave me four days to unpack and pack to catch a flight back to Albuquerque on June 13 that I had ticketed a month earlier.  I drove to Buena Vista, Colorado, on the 14th and the next day was hiking in the Maroon Bells Wilderness west of Aspen.  Dramatic, sheer, snow-topped slopes close to town reminded me of the terrain in the Alps.  Such proximity also makes this Wilderness hugely popular.  I was told that the road in will be closed to automobile traffic in a few days; visitors will go in and out from Aspen by bus.

I ended up in Aspen because I drove northwest out of Buena Vista toward the Continental Divide at Independence Pass, looking for the Continental Divide Trail.  Not a sign or trailhead did I see.  So I settled for the spectacular Maroon Bells.  Only later did I learn that the CDT has been relocated to cross Hwy 82 near Twin Lakes, east of the pass at a much lower elevation.  Had I found it, I would have passed up a hike there.  Too much development and recreation at the lake.

Next:  Views above Berthoud Pass and in Rocky Mountain National Park.

Before Bill returned to Taos, we discussed where my next stop would be as I headed north for day hikes on the Continental Divide Trail.  He urged me to see Ghost Ranch on US Hwy 84, so that’s where I went next.  It’s right beside the CDT in northern New Mexico.

I reported to the office and asked the young lady behind the desk if there were any long-distance hikers coming through.  She thought there might be four young men right then down in the “computer lab” and gave me directions. The four had their packs strewn about and, yes, they and their packs looked like they had been on the trail for a month.

“Anyone here on his way to Canada?” I asked.  All four looked up from the three monitors in the room and smiled.  It turned out three of them were from Israel and the fourth was from Paris.  Shai, Gil and Aviv had hooked up with Rudy, the Parisian, just before they set out from the Mexican border below Columbus in early April.  But during the last few days on the trail they had found the snows getting deeper; at one point the day before, Rudy stepped off the trail and went in up to his waist.  They were searching the Internet for weather info and a possible ride to Rawlins, WY.  Their new plan was to take a month and hike toward Riverton across the Great Divide Basin and let the snows melt, eventually doubling back to hike sections they missed.  I could offer them little advice on the idea, but could take them to Santa Fe in two days, if no better offer surfaced sooner.

The CDT follows the swiftly flowing Chama River east where it has carved through red rock canyons, then turns south at Hwy 84 and Ghost Ranch.  I photographed these glorious red rock escarpments in sunrise light and then hiked up Box Canyon, spotting violet-green swallows, Virginia’s warbler and willow flycatcher before retracing my steps.  My new-found friends were still at Ghost Ranch when I was ready to go, so I took them to Santa Fe where we all had dinner together at The Blue Bean.

How did a 23-year-old in a kibbutz in Israel ever get the idea to hike the Continental Divide Trail, I wanted to know.  Gil had learned about the Pacific Crest Trail on the Internet and hiked it in 2008.  (His partner from home quit on the second day.)  That trip was a great experience for him, so after his tour in the military he talked up the CDT to two friends, Aviv and Shai.  And here they were.  All four agreed that it was the people they met along the way that made the adventure special.

But now I was facing the same problem my young hikers faced: snow lay ahead for me, too.

For months I had planned to break my April-to-July hiking schedule with a project on Great Abaco Island to photograph the endangered Bahama parrot.  So I moved my schedule up a few days, found a place in Santa Fe to store my truck and RV, and flew from Albuquerque to Jacksonville on May 13th.  I’ll return to the trail in a month, in time to catch the peak wildflower season at the higher elevations from Colorado to Montana.  My next blog will be up June 20, give or take a day.

As I drove back to my RV from Hachita, NM, going west on St. Rd. 9 to St. Rd. 80, I decided to stop where the Continental Divide Trail crosses the  highway and walk north for a while, my first steps on the CDT in years.  I hadn’t been there five minutes when a Jeep pulled up and two hikers got out of the back seats.  I chatted them up.  This married couple had flown into El Paso from Germany two days prior and elected to get into shape for a hike to the Canadian border on the CDT by walking 100 miles west to intercept it.  The other two in the Jeep had offered them a ride, instead.  Here their journey was to begin.  We stepped off together, but I left them shortly to return to my truck and the comfort of my waiting RV.

On  May 1, I drove north from “the boot” of southern New Mexico all the way to Truth or Consequences, NM.  I am told it is the only town named after a television show.  Is someone pulling my leg?  At this point I was west of Roswell, New Mexico, a town  famous for inhabitants who keep seeing flying saucers.  I saw in National Enquirer once an article about  a Roswell woman who reported having sex with an alien from a spaceship.  (I promise you I only saw this because I was in a grocery check-out line.)  From “T or C” I drove west to Pie Town  because the CDT crosses there on its way north.  Pie Town, Roswell, Truth or Consequences, Hachita…..you get the idea.  Not your run-of-mill place, New  Mexico.

Only one of four cafes was open that morning, so I walked in to order a pie for lunch.  (Yes, they are famous for their pies.)  I told the waitress I was a hiker.

“Three hikers left out of here about an hour ago,” she said, “headed north.” 

“”Hold the pie,” I said.  “I’ll be back,” and ran off to chase them down.

Ron Smith from Portland, Dave Kessler from Seattle and Heiko Balling from Germany had been hiking together for several weeks.  Balling was going all the way.  I had questions about the details of their trip, and they had a favor to ask.  Would I cache three one gallon jugs of water for them south of Grants?  Of course, I’d be happy to.

I pulled into an RV park east of Grants, NM the next night and within an hour, by prearrangement, Bill Kemsley pulled in from Taos.  We shared the next three days, first stashing that water, then doing two day hikes on the CDT.  (Bill and I founded the American Hiking Society.  He also founded Backpacker; I also founded the Florida Trail Association and Big City Mountaineers.)  I was told ages ago as a young ensign in flight  school that officers were not to talk about religion, politics and sex in the mess.  Mostly, that’s what Bill and I talked about….Oh! and about trails, too.

Bill left on a Sunday afternoon.  I hung around for half a day to join Kessler, Smith and Balling for dinner at the “Asian Super Buffet.”  A big issue effecting their plans was the late spring snows blanketing northern New Mexico and southern Colorado.  Skeins of hikers leaving the Mexican border during March and April would all be effected.

Pie Town, NM:

To call Hachita a town is a painful stretch of a good word.  I’d call it wrack in a sea of creosote bush.  As I crawled east down SR 9, on my right I passed five dirt roads scratched through the scrub at right angles to the paving.  By turning south on any one of them I could see four similar roads parallel with the highway.  Welcome to Hachita.

As I made my first turn, I noticed a Border Patrol 4WD pickup with camper top right behind me.  I turned left at the first intersection.  So did the truck.  Was this someone’s idea of intimidation?  I stopped without pulling over and walked back to the truck.  The young driver in green uniform looked like he might have served a tour in Iraq with the Marines.  Shades, crew-cut, blond.  “Did you want to talk to me?” was my greeting.

“Not yet.”  Cool.  Very cool dude.  I asked if he knew “Sam.”  He did not.  I said he took hikers to the Continental Divide trailhead.  I was looking for him.  I was writing a book about hiking and backpacking and would spend the next two months sampling the trail.  We parted.

Before I could enter the post office to ask there, a man coming through the door pointed out Sam’s house to me.  He also told me Sam’s last name was Hughes.  But Sam wasn’t home, so I doubled back two blocks to the only store in town to ask if they knew where he was.  A young woman inside said she hadn’t seen him that day.  So I left a message at his back door and in the store that I would be back the next day at 10 o’clock.

The next day he wasn’t there.  What else could possible be going on around here to occupy his time?  I decided to photograph some of the vacant and more striking tumble-down buildings.  One could tell the houses that were lived in: they were filled with yard clutter.  Hachita had the appearance of a ghost town in the making with about 60 people hanging on.

One young couple might revive the place, Rocky and Shyanne McDonald.  They have just re-opened the only country store there and might even put Hachita on the map.  He is a professional rodeo bull rider with Wrangler and Jack Daniels as two national sponsors.

I was an hour into my photography when a small white pickup pulled up to me.  “You looking for Sam?”

“You must be Sam.”  I explained that I was gathering information on the CDT.  He invited me to his backyard where we spent the next hour or two “jawing,” as he put it.

About 10 years ago a backpacker walked up to Sam right there in Hachita and asked if he knew anyone who could take him to the southern terminus of the CD trail.  Sam said he could.  And now anyone who wants to hike the entire 3100 miles from Mexico to Canada heads for Hachita during April and May and asks for Sam.

Last year he took 37 people down to the Mexican border.  With the season half over so far, he has taken 17.  His charge is $90.  (Give this idea time: 2000 people set out from Springer Mt., Georgia, to hike the 2100 mile Appalachian Trail to Mt. Katahdin, Maine.)

There is nothing at the trailhead except a picnic table put there by the BLM, so I decided talking to Sam in the shade of his yard would be more pleasant and productive than a 4-hour road trip, 3½ of it over a spine-twisting rock road.  (Sam wants the BLM to move the table to a water cache he maintains at mile post 15.  Nobody uses the table; they’re too eager to snap a few pictures and be off.)  By the way, a granite marker will be placed at the terminus in a week.

Sam regaled me with stories of the hikers and the area.  Perhaps I’ll have space in my book for some of them.

Hachita, NM:

Next:  Through Silver City to connect with Bill Kemsley, friend and founder of Backpacker, in Acoma, west of Albuquerque.  We will be locating the CD route north of Grants where it crosses I-40.

My Travel Rig

There are too many live oaks on my property to allow me to pull my RV fifth wheel up to the house, so I parked it in the subdivision between me and US Hwy 1 and loaded it up Saturday and Sunday, April 17 and 18.  I left Monday morning in time to reach Tallahassee by noon and have lunch with Caroline Stahala.

Caroline is in a PhD program to study the Bahama parrot, an endangered bird only found on Great Inagua and Great Abaco.  It nests in the ground in available limestone cavities, a great place to be when fires or hurricanes sweep through the pine woods, its habitat.  This adaptive strategy did not prepare it for its present nemesis, feral cats.  So Caroline plays mother hen to the birds she is studying and is working on ways to save the birds.  I will find time this summer to attempt to photograph this wary bird.

From Tallahassee I made it the same day to Dauphin Island, Alabama, for a day of bird-watching as the migration begins, but I was a bit early.  Not a lot of activity, so I rolled on to New Orleans where I spent two delightful nights with Peck and Pam Hayne.  Peck and I barely managed to say out of trouble and remain at Yale together over fifty-five years ago.  I left their house early on the 23rd and had gone about five miles when disaster struck.

If you read my blogs last fall, you will remember that the wheel fell off the driver’s side rear axle.  As I rode up a short curb at about three mph, the wheel this time fell off the driver’s side front axle.  It was Friday morning with the weekend ahead of me.  The poor Haynes got stuck with me for six more nights before I could roll again.  Believe me, there will be another warranty claim!

I took my frustration out on the highway and drove 1300 miles in the next 30 hours, over 40 mph including sleep.  I pulled into an RV resort in Vado, New Mexico, in time to make dinner.  I had made it to the state hosting the southern terminus of the Continental Divide and the Continental Divide Trail.

The next day I checked in with the BLM (Bureau of Land Management) to get some maps and with the Border Patrol to let them know I would be at the end of nowhere south of I-10 in the southwest corner of the state.  Then I found Rusty’s RV Ranch on Hwy 80, 23 miles south of the interstate.

There are 50 miles of almost nothing from I-10 to the Mexican border.  The biggest industry there for 100 miles running east and west is border protection.  White pickups with a diagonal green blaze are the most common vehicles one sees.  The town of Hachita lies in the middle of this vast space.  If I wanted to get to the trailhead of the CDT, I was told to drive to this town on SR 9, go to the post office and ask for Sam.  Last name unknown.  So that’s what I did.

I’ll finish my story about Sam in the next blog.

Jim