The Worst Moments of the Continental Divide Trail (2023 Survey)

During the Continental Divide Trail Hiker Survey, in addition to sharing the scariest moments of their CDT thru-hikes, CDT hikers also share the lowest moment(s) of the trail.

Hiking the CDT means more than blindly wandering down a path filled with trail angels eager to help hikers on their journey across the Continental Divide. A lot of the trail can, to put it plainly, suck. And sometimes, it sucks a lot.

WARNING! If you are worried about a loved one hiking the Continental Divide Trail or have doubts about whether you want to undertake this journey yourself, you should probably stop reading now (or maybe you should definitely read this).

Notes on the Data

• This year, 173 CDT surveys were completed. Are you hiking next year? You can sign up to take the survey here.
• Some responses are sorted and colored – e.g., northbound or southbound. More on this below.
• The Continental Divide Trail and thru-hiking generally use acronyms and jargon. If anything is unclear, the thru-hiker glossary may help. Please comment if you still can’t find what you’re looking for.
• I refer to survey respondents collectively as this year’s “class.” Remember, this is a sample and not a comprehensive survey of every person on the CDT.
• To be notified of new survey results, click here.

Social Sadness

• It’s tough being away from my family.

• I was in Silver City going SOBO and hadn’t seen even a day hiker in 500 miles. I realized that if I didn’t want to finish alone, I needed to buy a toy dinosaur to keep me company. I named him Rodrigo, and he has a whole backstory.

• Snow and loneliness in Colorado.

• Mental battle pushing through the trail alone. On days where you are less motivated or down being alone doesn’t help you get a move on like it does when your friends are packing up around you.

• Being alone in southern Colorado with high snow conditions when most other hikers had gotten off the trail to wait out snow conditions.

Weather Woes

• Seven straight days of rain.

• We’re camping in a dried-out cowpond in a basin, praying that the lightning storm that’s been going on for hours won´t hit us. Knowing that, when the storm is over, we´ll be in the same situation again tomorrow and the day after that, and there is NOTHING you can do about it now or then. You have to go through it with little to no protection. Knowing that multiple storms will come and you can´t avoid them is mentally draining.

• It poured down raining, and I got drenched.  It was very cold, and after several hours of hiking, while it was freezing cold in the rain, I arrived at my destination.  It wasn’t easy to get my tent up in the rain as the ground cover puddled up, but I eventually could.  It took me about an hour or so after getting into the tent to get situated, removing my wet clothes while mopping up the tent, getting my air mattress in place, then my sleeping bag, and finally getting inside.   It was a very miserable day.  The next morning was a beautiful, sunny day, so I spent three hours drying out before getting started.

• We had a six-day stretch that included the Wind River Range, which included a few days of downpours. On the last day of this stretch, North of the Winds and south of the pass to Dubois, there was close lightning and thunder, hail the size of quarters, rain, mud, cows, cow diarrhea, and a forest fire burn area. We were cold and wet and could not find a place to camp after walking over 20+ mi / 32+ km We ended up taking forest service roads to the Lava Mountain Lodge for a 28mi / 45 km day. They had no rooms available, so we had to camp on their grass in the rain.

• South of Lima, I experienced several days in a row of 40°F / 4°C persistent rain, often accompanied by high wind. I’m pretty sure I was borderline hypothermic at times. Halfway through the section, with no end in sight to the rain, I felt pretty defeated. I decided to bypass a section of trail I really wanted to see because it didn’t make sense to put myself through those conditions and not even see the views.

Unforeseen Sadness

• Crying for eight hours because of the smoke.

• After just reaching the Winds, my depression was really bad; my hiking partner had gotten off trail, and I was lonely. I felt so stressed about the mileage I had to do to make it through Colorado and hopefully beat the snow, and I was having a tiny existential crisis about what role thru-hiking played in my life anymore. I was so unmotivated and really struggling overall. I ended up skipping a lot of Colorado and not doing the whole trail this year, but I really grappled with the decision for a while before making it.

• The day before I got to Lima, I completely ate shit trying to step on a wet, loose rock. Glasses? Gone. Arm? Bloody. Ass? Bruised like hell. To make matters worse, it had been raining intermittently all day, and the forecast called for continued showers throughout the next two days. At least tomorrow was town day, right? Nope. Lima was an absolute shithole not even worthy of being a trail town. No resupply, no vacant hotel rooms, and the only open restaurant in town took over two hours to serve food. The only time in all 2700+ mi / 4,300+ that I seriously questioned what I was doing.

• I had some very low temperatures and constant rain in a long stretch of Idaho, which is rough weather because I lose feeling in my fingers quickly. This was immediately after saying goodbye to my PCT trail family And the PCT itself before flipping over to the CDT. So I was suddenly alone after 2,300 mi / 3,700 km with the same trail family. I had returned to the place where I’d quit the CDT two years earlier when my mother died. I found this handful of days to be the low point for me across these last two states. But this hike has gone exactly as it should have this time, and I’ve enjoyed it all.

• I lost my Garmin inReach and had to turn back to look for it. The hike was 16 roundtrip miles (26 km) and involved three steep/high elevations. I slipped on snow, and my left knee hit the rock. It swelled, and I limped all day. The next day, I had to bail out and road walking with no shade all day.

• Between Chama and Wolf Creek, I reached my mental and physical limits. The snow was insane, and the snowy/icy traverses definitely took a mental toll. Navigating the snowy trail and postholing were some of the most physically demanding things I’d ever done.

• My lowest moment was having a problem with a bear repeatedly trying to get my food when I was camped alone after my first 31-mi / 50-km day on the trail. I managed to fend it off three times and was absolutely exhausted the next day. The silver lining: I felt extremely validated for hanging my food properly every night in bear country.

Sick and Injured

• I got really sick before the Teton Crest Trail and lost control of my legs and bowels. Needless to say, I stayed in my tent and pooped in a ziplock bag.

• Dealing with giardia for three weeks and still hiking 25 mi / 40 km. I was so exhausted.

• A single day when I got painfully injured (knee), broke two important items of gear, got drenched in a thunderstorm, had diarrhea, and had to go through a very steep section.

• After hiking from Yellowstone to Riverside without any significant breaks, I had stomach issues in Riverside. There were no rooms available, so I returned to the trail and curled up in my tent after only 1.8 mi / 2.9 km, riding out a fever. I couldn’t really eat the next day, and the whole morning was stormy.

• Giardia in Montana – shit myself.

• I broke my wrist and had to get surgery. Was out for two weeks in Wyoming.

• I got sick halfway between Lima and Leadore and had some hard days. I was feverish, my whole body ached, and I had zero energy on a section of trail that had the most elevation gain/loss since Colorado. On top of that, it was very hot and exposed with long water carries. It took everything in me to do those steep climbs and make the necessary miles to get to Leadore without running out of food. I saw nobody else for that whole stretch of trail too, which made it harder. I really missed my trail family and just felt generally awful.

• A serious infection hit on a blister halfway between Elliston and Butte, but I had to keep hiking. Pretty much cried for an entire day because it hurt so much.

• Contracting giardia in the last few weeks of my hike absolutely wrecked me.

• I had the flu for nearly all of Montana and a pretty bad sinus infection. I took zeros, but I really needed a couple of days off, but I didn’t have the patience. It felt like I was just getting by and never feeling good, even when I was pretty intentional about self-care in town.

Quitting the Trail

• All of Glacier National Park. I was ready to quit, but my trail partner made me continue to walk. I was also very sick, and my feet had untreated pains.

• The mosquitos in Yellowstone almost made me quit. That was the only time I considered quitting. Colorado as a whole was stunning…but incredibly challenging physically, mentally, and emotionally.

• When it rained for a week straight in the winds and after. I was so tired of wet shoes and being cold. I wanted to quit.

• When I reluctantly accepted that it was in my best interest (and health) to leave the trail.

• In Idaho, it was raining for 30 hours. I was wet, cold, exhausted. I walked 20 mi / 32 km, and there were 20 mi / 32 km left. I didn’t know anymore why I was doing such a thing. My body was painful, and my mind wanted to quit.

• In the Basin (Wyoming) in a storm. That’s when I quit my hike and bailed out. I was also pretty lonely the whole time.

• Lordsburg to Silver City, New Mexico. Lack of trail, cow pastures, poor water sources, bleak desert, miles of paved highway road walking. All of that plus family made me quit for two weeks before I came back to trail and finished.

• I was ready to quit in Idaho/Southern Montana, but I knew I would hate myself more than the trail if I did.

• Getting really sick and having to get off trail.

• Had bad blisters through the Bob Marshall, bad enough that I thought I might have to get off the trail.

• Finding out Dad had cancer and having to figure out how to get off the trail.

Colorado Sadness

• All of Colorado, physically, mentally, and emotionally. The snow was insane in the first week of June.

• Colorado was tough times. My hiking buddy and I got out of sync, and it was stressful trying to stick together. We decided to make it work and stuck together, tho. I busted my butt the whole trail to get through Colorado before the snow. I was in Colorado at what should’ve been the perfect time (Aug 23-Sept 25), but I had tons of hail, lightning, and snow. My hiking buddy and I got struck by lighting 6 mi / 9.7 km south of Monarch Pass. I felt the surge of electricity in my chest, and he got knocked to the ground. We are not sure how direct/indirect it was. The ground was covered in hail, so we think it struck somewhere on the ridge slightly above us and traveled through the hail. We went back to Salida to get an EKG at the hospital. They gave us an all-good. It was tough mentally to go back the next day, but by the day after that, I felt good again. I had some PTSD after that, and all of the continuing storms through the San Juans were extra scary. We had the first snow on September 15; it snowed two more times.

• Averaging more than 25 mi / 40 km per day between Grand Lake and Breckenridge, I hobbled into Breckenridge with an infected blister on my left foot and an arch-related issue with my right foot. Although I was halfway done, the fact that I wasn’t actually indestructible was a sobering realization.

• In Colorado, we took an unmarked alternate through the Southern San Juans that would avoid a dangerous traverse and lead us to Platoro. We had to navigate a very steep, densely forested section that was exhausting and slow. The next morning, we had to cross a waist-deep river, traveling fast, and we both fell in and were swept away.

• Between Lake City (after the ordeal of the San Juans) and shortly before Grays Peak, I did not see a single other CDT hiker on the trail. That section was physically tough, and I was mentally struggling hard.

• Entering the San Juan’s this year was tough. I was ready for the snow, but on my first day in, I had to self-arrest many times. After an exhausting 8 mi / 13 km and two separate storms, I decided to set up camp and turned around the next morning. I took alternates around the South San Juan’s, but I sure didn’t want to.

• The first three days were spent traveling from Chama to Pagosa Springs. I didn’t pack enough food, and I had no prior snow-traveling experience… I had to self-arrest once. I thought about pressing the SOS on my in Reach, but I took a short rest after the fall and managed to find my way around the snowpack. I bailed to the Blue / Green line after that and avoided most of the snow travel afterward.

• Spending approximately 15-17 hours a day in the tent during daily thunderstorms in the mountains of Colorado. Here, I meet my mental limit for the first time in my life.

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