CDT Day 55 – Parting of the Waters

Date: 8/15/20

Daily Miles: 23

Total Miles: 982

This morning we finished off the climb we had started at the end of yesterday. It was probably the most climbing we did today, but that’s not saying much. It did bring us into the sun pretty early today, which was nice.

We had a long descent into a river valley, where we spent almost the whole rest of the day. One benefit to walking in a river valley all day was that water was very plentiful and we never had to carry a lot. It was very hot today and we were exposed to the sun most of the day, so we were drinking a lot of water.

Today was a big departure from yesterday in terms of the number of people we saw. We saw a group of five folks presumably out for a few days of camping and fishing; we saw several groups of guys from Wyoming Catholic College who were on a 21 day freshman orientation backpacking trip; and we saw several horse packing groups. In all, we probably saw over thirty people, but they were packed into about an hour and a half of the day.

Mid-morning, we stopped for a quick break at a creek called Two Oceans Creek. We noticed a sign where the creek split into two smaller creeks. The signed said “Parting of the Waters”…one fork of the creek heads to the Atlantic Ocean and the other fork heads to the Pacific Ocean. Pretty cool!

Luckily we were able to keep our feet dry today. There was one creek in the afternoon that required fording, but we were enjoying our dry feet and knew there wasn’t another river to ford, so we decided to take off our shoes and socks and go across barefoot. We were pretty appalled at how dirty our feet were when we took off our socks, but we shouldn’t have been surprised because the trail was super dusty today.

We were lucky at the end of the day to find a camping spot with live trees to hang from and no dead trees close enough to fall on us. A lot of the trees in the area have been killed in a forest fire in the past…definitely not trees we would consider hanging from. We even heard a burned tree fall this afternoon and there was no wind. We were very happy to find this camping spot.