Blazing a Trail Down America’s Spine

In return for a handful of beads, a pound of flour, an American flag and a vague promise of firearms, Shoshone Indians granted Lewis and Clark safe passage over the Continental Divide nearly 200 years ago.

Modern trailblazers should be so lucky.

A well-heeled alliance of hikers and outdoor equipment manufacturers has returned to the country made famous by the 19th century explorers, this time to build the nation’s longest wilderness hiking trail--one stretching the length of the Continental Divide, from Canada to Mexico.

The vision of a 3,100-mile route through some of the West’s most rugged and historic countryside has won the approval of Congress, prompted contributions from a dozen major corporations, inspired hundreds of volunteers to work on the trail and led towns to link up their parks and jogging paths with the trail.

Not everyone welcomes the project. As its sponsors hold town meetings with residents along the route, the trail has become a lightning rod for a broader debate about the impact of recreation and tourism on rural communities and remote, wild country.

The route runs through five states, three national parks--Glacier, Yellowstone and Rocky Mountain--a dozen wilderness areas and a score of national forests.

But it also goes by 300-year-old villages whose defiant residents still identify with their Spanish pioneer ancestors, and through Indian reservations and ranches where there are strong suspicions that modern-day trails bring trouble--urban refugees, environmental zealots, cultural conflicts, land-use disputes and a higher cost of living.

“We try to tell people we are not leading a wagon train full of cappuccino machines and California expatriates,” said one member of the Continental Divide Trail Alliance, the nonprofit group leading the campaign to complete the trail.

But it’s difficult to win over people like Moises Morales, a county commissioner from one of the old Spanish settlements who has helped bring the project to a halt at the Colorado-New Mexico border. “The last thing we need,” he said, “is a bunch of backpackers and tree huggers tramping through our yards.”

Tracing the crest of the Rocky Mountains for much of its length, the Continental Divide gets its name because it is the demarcation separating the headwaters of streams flowing east and west.

The impetus for a hiking trail following the entire route--making it longer than either the Appalachian Trail or the Pacific Crest Trail--came largely from two men. The first champion, in the 1960s, was the late Benton MacKaye, a forester who decades earlier had suggested the idea of an official Appalachian Trail following the longest chain of mountains in the East. He was succeeded by another devotee of the Appalachian Trail, Baltimore lawyer Jim Wolf, who set out to sell Congress on the idea of an even more spectacular route that would allow people to experience the American West as the pioneers did.

Funding Shortage

Congress endorsed creation of a Continental Divide Trail in 1978, but there was never enough money to get the job done. So there was only sporadic work on the project by the U.S. Forest Service, which began linking an extensive system of primitive logging roads and existing trails.

The government effort fell 1,000 miles short of completing the trail--setting the stage for the current push.

The trail is largely complete from the Canadian border south to the lower end of Yellowstone Park, and through virtually all of Colorado. Hikers in Idaho can cross the same high passes used by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark during their 1804-06 expedition to explore newly acquired Western territories.

In southern Wyoming, where the trail is not complete, its sponsors hope to track the wagon ruts of the old Oregon Trail for several miles.

In Colorado, it goes through ghost towns, past the sites of 19th century forts and battlefields and over a 14,000-foot mountain. Hikers taking it through the San Juan Mountains don’t cross a paved road for 146 miles. Farther north, it takes them down the main street of Grand Lake, Colo.

From snow-covered summits to waterless lowlands, the Divide can be a terror to traverse. During the summer, volunteers working on a section of the trail in northern Wyoming encountered many of the same hazards--summer snow storms, grizzly bears, impassable streams and cantankerous crew members--that 19th century expeditions endured.

“Two mules temporarily lost. One washed down stream. One horseman kicked in the head. One camp torn up by a grizzly bear. One person unhappy with food, campsites, group leader, weather etc.,” surveyor Dick Inberg wrote in his notes of two weeks supervising trail work in the mountains south of Yellowstone Park.

Inberg’s crew members were among more than 700 volunteers working this year to complete the job that was begun by the government, but which stalled by the early 1990s because of budget cuts and competing priorities.

The renewed enthusiasm to finish the trail is part of a surge of interest in outdoor recreation--hiking, cross-country skiing, backpacking, camping, biking, rock climbing, rafting and kayaking--that is pumping new life and money into old mining and ranching communities up and down the Rockies. The mountain West is one of the main areas making such activities a $40-billion industry in the nation.

Recognizing the benefits of high-profile public trails, the American Recreation Coalition, an industry trade group, began working with Bruce and Paula Ward--he was the president of the American Hiking Society, she a landscape architect--to take up where the Forest Service left off.

Led by the couple, the 2-year-old Continental Divide Trail Alliance boasts an impressive list of business partners, including the Coleman Co., Vasque, REI, L.L. Bean, Walmart, Amgen and the Sporting Goods Manufacturing Assn.

The alliance is counting on its corporate partners to pay for at least one-third of the $10-million cost.

In return, sponsors will have their names engraved on trail heads and will be given the opportunity to mention the trail and their support on products and commercials. To fund the rest, the alliance is looking to foundations, friendly environmental groups, individuals and the federal government.

The sponsors estimate that the last 1,000 miles will take as much as 10 years to finish.

Besides the physical work of clearing a trail where none exists and erecting signs and markers, the job involves acquiring easements across private property and trying to persuade skeptical land owners and environmentalists that the project is worthwhile.

For now, the biggest roadblock is in New Mexico, where the Continental Divide crosses the Jicarilla Apache reservation.

Alternate Route Proposed

Tribal objections to a public trail led the project’s promoters to propose an alternate route through the nearby Carson National Forest. But there they encountered Morales--a commissioner in Rio Arriba County--and his constituents who graze livestock in the forest and don’t want to share it with legions of hikers.

Though the land in question is publicly owned and managed by the Forest Service, many residents contend that an old Spanish land grant--awarded to their ancestors--gives them sovereignty over much of the national forest.

Courts long ago rejected the claim, but Forest Service officials point out that signs proclaiming “land or death” and occasional threats to newcomers make it clear that the ancient territorial grudge still festers.

Morales is not one to be taken lightly. He proudly recalls taking part in a notorious 1967 raid on the county courthouse in which a group of land-rights activists shot it out with sheriff’s deputies in an attempt to free jailed comrades.

There are other obstacles on the trail.

A copper mine straddles the Divide south of Silver City, N.M. A developer controls access to the Divide through Muddy Pass in northern Colorado.

Where the Divide meets the Mexican border, some people say a trail would only aggravate an already tense situation.

“You see a stranger walking around now and you don’t know if it’s a drug smuggler or a cattle thief,” said rancher William Hurt. “Just about everybody down here is armed and on edge. It would just make matters worse to have backpackers wandering through, looking for water and scaring the livestock.”

The nearby Gray Ranch, which has won national acclaim for environmental stewardship, doesn’t want hikers tramping across fragile grasslands being restored after years of neglect by previous owners.

“The only places a trail could go through is beside the streams’ banks and riparian vegetation, which we’re trying to protect,” said ranch manager Ben Brown.

Wilderness advocates in Colorado have filed legal challenges to block segments of the trail through wolverine and bighorn sheep habitat.

Meanwhile, some features of the trail have been the subject of continuing debate even among its sponsors--most notably the issue of motorized access by all-terrain vehicles, jeeps and snowmobiles.

Although Congress designated it as a hiking trail, the Forest Service made room for others and stated in its plan that 1,000 miles would be open to motors. Now officials of the Continental Divide Trail Alliance are saying the motorized portion will be about 420 miles, mostly through Wyoming’s Great Divide Basin.

Four-wheel drive interests are calling for companion routes, where possible.

“There’s room for everybody, not necessarily on the same trail, but on parallel trails. You can’t ignore motorized,” said Derrick Crandall, head of the American Recreation Coalition.

Lobbying for 20 Years

Jim Wolf, who began lobbying for the trail in Congress 20 years ago, is uncomfortable with the role of corporate sponsors, fearing that too much industry hype could turn a wilderness trail into an all-purpose recreational thoroughfare.

“I have real concerns about the promotional side of the project,” he said. “I would have preferred it without corporate sponsorship. It would take longer to complete the trail, but I think what we got in the end would be truer to the original intent.”

Others worry that corporate sponsors will want to tame the trail, providing too much access and too many conveniences.

“You’ll get more access points, parking lots, interpretive centers, Internet links and eventually a ton of people,” said Ray Kitson, a wilderness outfitter and guide in Salida, Colo. “Right now, if you want to walk the Divide, you get map and a compass and you take your chances.”

But it will require some doing to take the wilderness out of the trail. Passing through 12 official wilderness areas, where even mountain bikes are prohibited, the route runs through the last grizzly bear habitat in the lower 48 states and runs above timberline for many miles, exposing travelers to lightening and avalanches.

Bruce Ward, the trail alliance leader who once led expeditions in the Andes and the Himalayas, has gotten lost on the Continental Divide route.

This spring, forest rangers near Monarch Pass in central Colorado had to rescue a hiker who was trying to become one of the half-dozen people each year who spend up to six months hiking the entire Divide. “Apparently, he’d been hiking for days in deep snow and was delirious when we found him,” said ranger Jeff Hyatt.

Marauding Grizzly

After spending more than two months making his way down the Divide on horseback, Jonn Schulz reported that the trail almost did him in a couple of times. First a marauding grizzly caused his horse to throw him and panicked his pack horse, which fled with his provisions. Later, he turned down the wrong path in the Wind River Mountains and got lost in a blizzard.

It’s often hard-core travelers like Schulz, and not the weekend day-hikers, who say they would welcome a few more creature comforts on the route.

“I would have died in that snow storm if I hadn’t come upon an old, abandoned cabin,” he said.

Inberg, who has been exploring the Divide country south of Yellowstone since the early 1960s, has recommended that the Continental Divide Trail Alliance pay for a foot bridge where a young hiker drowned a year ago. The man was trying to ford a river during training at one of the nation’s premier wilderness survival schools.

Inberg has suffered a loss of his own in that country. He spent four years looking for the remains of a son, a wildlife biologist whose plane crashed near the Divide in 1991. Inberg said he nearly died himself when his mule threw him, breaking several ribs and puncturing a lung.

Last summer, he went back again, leading one of the volunteer crews working on the Divide trail.

“I know some people don’t want any improvements. They think we’re just going to open the place up to crowds of people. I have mixed feelings,” he said.

“I definitely enjoy coming here with my mules and enjoying the solitude. But the fact is a lot of people are here already. I counted 103 riders and hikers passing me on the trail on just one day last summer.

“We’re not going to make matters any worse with a Continental Divide Trail. But we might make it a little safer.”

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The Continental Divide Trail

What: Authorized by Congress in 1978, the trail will run 3,100 miles from Canada to Mexico, crossing five states, three national parks, 25 national forests and 12 wilderness areas. Much of the route follows established paths and logging roads.

Where it stands: The trail is two-thirds complete. The largest unfinished stretches are in Wyoming and New Mexico where trail sponsors are trying to negotiate rights-of-way with private land owners, rural villages and Native Americans.

Who can use it: Most of the trail will be reserved for hikers and horseback riders. But some of it is open to mountain bikes. Jeeps, all terrain vehicles and motorcycles are permitted on several hundred miles of the route.

What it will take to finish: Sponsors now estimate that completing the final 1,000 miles will cost $10 million and take up to 10 years.