Prologue
On the evening of June 1 Cassi picked me up from work and we drove 7 hours to Aztec. Unfortunately the map I'd printed to John's house came out blurry and unreadable. After not being able to rouse him on his phone and an hour wandering around his neighborhood, we'd conceded to sleep in the car. Fortunately, on our last desperate call, he sleepily answered and guided us the remaining 300 yards to his house. Not a good omen for navigating the CDT I thought, my head hitting the pillow. I was asleep in an instant.
We spent the spring getting ready by riding our bikes every where we went. We loaded down our bikes with what we would be carrying, about 14 pounds of gear each, not including food and water, to make the riding more realistic. However frequent rain kept us off trail and on pavement much more than we wanted. We wished some of this moisture would head to New Mexico. Allready there was a wild fire in the Gila wilderness that was changing our plans. Most of the gear we had from our Colorado Trail trip but this time, to make it easier to carry, we attached more to our bikes and put less in our packs. I did include a GPS, knowing navigation would be more of a challenge. After test riding friends' and demo 29 inch wheeled mt bikes for months I took the plunge and bought a new bike just a few weeks before we left. It was a joy to ride and made the trip even more fun.
New Mexico seemed to lend itself to mountain biking, especially this summer. Much of NM is dry, desert conditions worsened by extreme drought over the last few years. Most of the streams and ponds and many of the springs in southern NM were dry. Water sources can be 40 or more miles apart. Traveling those distances on foot seemed suicidal and with much of the trail in NM on dirt roads, mt bikes seemed to be the way to go. However, mt bikes are not allowed in certain wilderness areas and do not do well cross country (ie areas with no trail tread). To solve this we put together a trip that combined the CDT with The Great Divide Mt Biking Route (GDR) for bypassing wilderness and cross country sections. The GDR is a route composed of dirt roads developed by Adventure Cycling (http://wwww.adventurecycling.org) that follows the geographic divide and at times coincides with the CDT.
Selling this to our friends and family wasn't easy. Most thought us crazy or at least unbalanced. However, we were able to convince our friend- John Winkley of Aztec, NM and kindred Colorado Trail mt biker- to come with us. My parents, Bob and Helen, kindly agreed to help watch my younger daughters, Mila and Mika. Mika's mother, Dawn, and grand mother, Linda, also helped a lot. I was able to convince my coworkers I needed a month off work and I paid a locums physician to fill in for me.
It all began innocuously enough. While mountain biking the Colorado Trail in 2009 my oldest daughter, Cassi, and I noticed that it overlapped for miles with the Continental Divide Trail (CDT). We had heard in almost mythic tones about the CDT. It was over 3000 miles long. It went through the most remote wilderness in the lower 48 states. It was not complete and often went cross country. Few people attempted to travel it's entire length and even fewer did so in one season. We were hooked.
After researching the trail and talking we decided it would be best to travel it over several summers. Neither of us could take off the 5 months from school/work needed to complete the CDT in one season. We decided to travel south to north, starting at the Mexican border and doing one state each summer. First up- New Mexico .
