Continental Divide Trail Advocate Pushes For Its Completion

Jim Wolf is cutting a trail from Mexico to Canada, one tract of land at a time.

The Continental Divide Trail, approved by Congress in 1978, will be a 3,100-mile ribbon of dirt and rock along the nation’s backbone, through desert, mountains, plains and some of the most breathtaking wilderness of the continent.

Someday.

Congress set aside a 100-mile-wide corridor for a back-country trail but left mapping the route from New Mexico to Montana to the three federal agencies that control the various parcels of land. Wolf and others - but mostly Wolf - have been holding those agencies to it. The trail is about two-thirds complete, and Wolf says that, with luck, the Continental Divide Trail - the CDT - can be finished in 10 to 15 years.

Outdoors enthusiasts marvel at Wolf’s never-wavering vision of the trail and his persistence in pressing federal officials for the most scenic hiking route. “He absolutely is responsible for getting us this far,” says David Lillard, president of the 10,000-member American Hiking Society. “He has been a real thorn in their sides.”

Those whose sides have been irritated sigh or roll their eyes when Wolf is mentioned. There are strong differences on how to reach their shared goal. In insisting on the purest possible wilderness experience, Wolf has clashed with government officials and other hikers convinced that the trail will be completed only through consensus and compromise.

The task is as enormous as the land the CDT crosses. Consider that the more-famous Appalachian Trail required 16 years from proposal in 1921 to completion of a 2,100-mile route, in an era when environmental impact statements, endangered species acts and archaeological considerations were unnecessary.

Unlike the Appalachian Trail, the CDT is a do-it-yourself bush-whack rather than a connect-the-dots path. A mirror of the untamed land it crosses, the CDT has fewer directional markers, fewer places to grab a hot shower and square meal, more places where a mistake will kill you.

“On the Appalachian Trail, you don’t need a compass and maps. On the Continental Divide Trail, that would be suicide,” says Karen Berger of Westchester County, N.Y., who with her husband walked the CDT from end to end in 1991 and has written a book, “Where the Waters Divide.”

A hiker on the AT needs to carry food for at most five days between resupply points; a CDT hiker must figure on 14 days. The AT tops out at 6,642 feet at Clingman’s Dome in Tennessee; the CDT crosses the 14,000-foot peaks and snow fields of the Rockies.

And unlike the Appalachian Trail, few hikers will tackle the CDT in a single season. Not even Wolf, who trekked from Georgia to Maine in 1971 but conquered the CDT a piece at a time.

The Continental Divide is the series of crests that channel North American waterways toward the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and gives the trail its name. It also describes the relationship between the two sometimes competing groups that champion the CDT.

For Wolf, a 67-year-old lawyer who is retired from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the trail begins in Baltimore. Working alone from his sixth-floor condominium, he dispenses advice to hikers, lobbies the federal government, runs a website, and researches and publishes guidebooks and a newsletter in the name of the Continental Divide Trail Society.

He has run the society, now numbering 200 members, his own way since the beginning in 1978: “The people who think as I do will continue to be members. And if they don’t, they won’t.”

In Pine, Colo., Bruce and Paula Ward head the Continental Divide Trail Alliance. Founded two years ago, it has 500 members. It also has won as corporate backers the “big feet” of the outdoor world - L.L. Bean, Eastern Mountain Sports, National Geographic Society.

“Going after private money is the only way this is going to happen,” says Bruce Ward.

Wolf is adamant that the CDT be “a simple footpath for hikers and horsemen.” The Wards see room to compromise with mountain bikers in areas where the trail runs on roadways, as a way to build more support for the CDT.

The CDT will be completed because Wolf and the Wards - together or separately - will rely on the techniques that have gotten them this far. The Wards organized 31 teams of volunteers to hike segments of the trail beginning in July to determine which parts need relocating, repair or markers. The alliance will use the two-week inventory to award grants to local groups for making improvements.

Meanwhile, Wolf continues to press federal officials in New Mexico - where half the trail has yet to be mapped and some existing portions run along asphalt roadway - to find a better route.

“The trail should go through forest and near cliff dwellings,” Wolf insists. “The official route misses the reason you’re down in that country.”