Braving raging rivers, thunder storms and giant snow lopes, Robert Manning thru hiking his way home from the Mexican border to Canada on the Continental Divide Trail – a journey of 3,100 miles (nearly 5,000 km) through the states of New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, Idaho and Montana.
Some mornings are so cold that he wakes up to frozen socks and has to warm them up with a brisk hike.
“You’re sitting on a rock on a ridge top and looking back over this huge vista and realising you just walked across the whole thing, how grandiose it is. But the main memory stickers are the terrifying moments that you just somehow managed to get through,” says the adventurer.
The general mantra for thru hiking the CDT is to embrace the brutality.
“I’m starting to understand what they mean.”
Robert says that for about eight hours a day he feels nice and warm in his tent, another eight hours a day he is somewhere fun, and the remaining eight hours are spent stuck in a situation he’s trying to get out of.
“Hip deep in a snow bank, or thunderstorms chasing you around, but it all passes and it’s a fun story to tell.”
Being so far away from the daily bustle and focused solely on the weather, trail safety, the next river crossing or ascent brings things down to the essentials for him.
“It’s kind of like an analogy to packing. First you pack all this stuff and a month in you realise 90 per cent of it you don’t need […], so the mind set it similar and you realise what matters and doesn’t really matter.”
“Also your mind just wanders and you think all these crazy thoughts as you’re tracking through the bush and you get the universe all figured out, and the next day you forget what you thought,” he laughs.
Having been a forest fire fighter for 17 years and holding a commercial pilot license, Robert has solid outdoors and map reading skills and knows how to deal with dicey situations.
However, he doesn’t carry an emergency beacon and his family only knows he’s made it through the next stretch when he gets to a town and can update his facebook page with pictures and stories of the days past.
Despite the remoteness of the trail, though, hikers do meet each other frequently as there’s only a limited time corridor this trail can be done in.
“There’s only been a few days where I’ve been hiking entirely on my own.”
As he comes through Leadville, CO, he has completed about 1,300 miles of his epic adventure and is down to one set of clothes with various layers.
“I just wear the same thing everyday, which is great freedom. I don’t have to choose anything.”
The one set includes his cycling shorts that co-function as underwear.
Robert reckons river crossings double up as underwear washing days when thru hiking.
I think he made that part up because I don’t remember a wall of funk greeting me when we met, but then again, he had probably already showered and washed his clothes by then – wearing only his rain coat so that everything else could go in the washer.
Having only one set of clothes helps keep the weight down. Starting out with a big pack and gear for all sorts of eventualities, Robert says he soon sent parcels to his sister, realising he had completely overpacked.
“I had a knee brace in there, which, if I needed a knee brace, I wouldn’t be able to be on the trail.”
Gaining experience as he went, he improved his planning skills to the degree that he can now largely avoid emergencies.
“Instead of packing for emergencies, you just preplan and avoid emergencies, which is probably one of the best things to keep the weight down.”
His pack is now down to 20 pounds, excluding food and water.
And despite all the challenges, Robert is keen to extend his time on the trail. Having bought an orchard in Canada, he has time to hike while the trees grow and is moving faster than planned, giving him extra room to play.
The CDT runs to the Glacier National Park on the US border with Canada, but his true goal is a Canadian mountain his parents used to take him to as a kid.
“They are both teachers, so they had the summers off and they’d stick us all in a van […] and bring us out to the mountains for a month.”
Mt. Assiniboine is another few hundred miles of thru hiking along the Canadian Great Divide Trail, and trekking out to that mountain means more to Robert than just ending his journey at the Canadian border.
“I can’t wait to get there and see it again. Even in the crappy times, that’s what I think about is getting back there.”
“There is a neat little waterfall that comes off one of the adjacent mountains into a pool and there are always these little trout in the pool and I can always catch them. So that’s where I’m going, to catch those little trout.”
