Where Walking Becomes a State of Being: Finishing the Continental Divide Trail in 95 days
Aka the story of how Shane earned the trail name "Speedy G."
Eli Jaynes ‘23
Shane Berry ‘23 is no stranger to long walks. I mean really long walks. Alone. For months.
Shane got hooked on long hikes after high school. That’s when he decided to thru-hike the Appalachian Trail during the summer before his first year at CC. In Shane’s mind, his AT hike was supposed to be a one-time, bucket-list adventure. Hike the AT, and head off to school, simple as that.
Of course, it wasn’t that simple for Shane. His Appalachian Trail hike resonated with him, and he fell in love with long-distance backpacking. By the time he’d finished the AT, Shane was already thinking about his next trip – the Continental Divide Trail (CDT).
For Shane, hiking the iconic route quickly shifted from imagination to reality, “I was like, ‘Oh I should hike the CDT between semesters in college,’ and it went from a joke into ‘Oh I could actually do that.’”
His ambitious idea came together into a realistic plan sometime around the beginning of his sophomore year. By the time his Covid-affected school year wrapped up in May 2021, Shane was on a plane to New Mexico, heading to the Crazy Cook monument on the U.S.-Mexico border to start his 3,000-mile trek to Canada.
The Continental Divide Trail is easily one of the most ambitious thru-hikes in the country. The route stretches 3,100 miles from the southern border with Mexico through five states to the Canadian border in Montana’s Glacier National Park. It traverses some of the most rugged terrain in the country, with its high point on Colorado’s 14,270-foot Gray’s Peak. On average, only about 150 people finish the route end-to-end each year, and it usually takes about five months.
Shane made it to the Canadian border in 95 days. Solo.
Shane at the start of his trek. [Photo] Tim Sharp
New Mexico
Standing in the New Mexico desert last May, Shane was nervous but confident. His experience on the Appalachian Trail told him that he was capable of finishing the hike, but this time around he knew all about the discomfort he was going to face. He wasn’t a novice anymore, and didn’t have the luxury of not knowing about the challenges that were upcoming. He never doubted that he’d finish it, as long as the first section went smoothly.
In Shane’s words, “If I make it to the New Mexico-Colorado border, there's no way I’m not going to finish the trail.”
And so Shane started walking. And he kept walking until it was the only thing that felt normal to him. A trail like the CDT is so mind-bogglingly long that Shane says he never tried to conceptualize the scale of what he was doing. Instead, he took everything a day at a time, a mile at a time, sometimes having to tell himself, “I’m alive and still able to walk, so I’ll just keep walking and figure out what I’m going to do tomorrow.” And every tomorrow that rolled around, Shane got up and kept walking.
He’d wake up and get on the trail each morning, brushing his teeth and eating breakfast while walking. He’d hardly stop until dinner, when he’d allow himself a quick break to eat before continuing on until it got dark and it made sense to go to sleep. On the early sections of the trail, Shane says he kept track of his miles and tried to stick to 30-mile days. After a while, though, 30 miles a day became second nature and he stopped caring quite so much about mileage.
The trick, according to Shane, is to get to a place where hiking feels more natural than anything else.
The sweet spot is when “walking feels like your base state and when you’re sitting that feels weird.” At this point, it was no longer remarkable to him when he’d spend 14 straight hours on his feet. It no longer felt taxing to his body or his mind, but just felt natural.
In this state, alone in the wilderness for upwards of three months, Shane says his mind found a kind of quiet freedom that doesn’t exist elsewhere. Moving along the trail, his mind was simultaneously completely zoned out and fully immersed in the terrain around him. He would often have the same fragment of a song on loop in his head for hours, while watching that section of the trail go by, fully absorbing the scenery around him.
Mountain goat on the Argentine Spine. [Photo] Shane Berry
Colorado
A particularly peaceful moment came in Yellowstone National Park, somewhere he’d expected to run into swarms of tourists. Instead, Shane found the park empty and he felt like he was sharing it with only the bison and the wolves around him.
“At one point I stopped and I was watching this geyser and then this baby red fox ran out and was playing in the geothermal field there before running away…” Shane trails off recounting this scene, clearly reliving those moments among the geysers and turquoise geothermal pools without a person in sight.
Quiet moments of solitude like this one are part of what’s so rewarding about these long hikes for Shane. He loves being able to pull back from daily life and be immersed in the slow, quiet nature of his task, with nothing to do but walk.
But of course, a 3,000-mile hike doesn’t come without its fair share of suffering.
The crux of the trek came near the trail’s end, in the Bob Marshall Wilderness in northern Montana. This section of the trail is the longest stretch without a good resupply point–200 miles of wilderness without even crossing a road. 80 or so miles in, as Shane was setting up camp, it started to rain. As he rushed to get his tarp set up, Shane realized that his headlamp and tent stakes were gone. In his frantic search, he pulled everything out of his bag, soaking his sleeping bag and clothes in the rain.
“So here I was, in the heart of grizzly country, without a light, in the rain, cold and wet, without a way to make a shelter.”
Miserable, he pulled his tarp over his head against the rain, crawled into his soaked sleeping bag, and tried to sleep.
Well over 100 miles from any semblance of civilization, Shane was forced to repeat this process for the next four dismal days. He’d roll out of his soaked sleeping bag and have to jog just to stay warm in the rain, only to get to camp and crawl back into his makeshift cocoon for a meager attempt at rest.
Coming out on the other side of his Bob Marshall ordeal, Shane wasn’t more than a day or two from Glacier National Park, the final stretch of the CDT.
Big smile at the border. [Photo] Shane Berry
Montana
95 days and three pairs of trail shoes since he left the Crazy Cook monument in New Mexico, Shane hit the Canadian border. Taking just about three months to cover 3,100 miles, he shaved a month or two off of the normal CDT time and was done with just enough time to head back to CC for block 1 of his junior year.
After 3,100 miles of solo hiking, jumping back into daily life wasn’t exactly easy. Compared to three months on the trail, life in Colorado Springs was over stimulating. It took a while for Shane to get used to the constant noise around him. Just the sound of cars going by outside felt foreign, and it was strange to be back in a world that required him to be constantly engaged with something. In everyday life, there’s always some way to be entertained, always something to be doing. On the trail, Shane had to learn how to switch his mind off and zone out for hours on end. Coming back was a shock to his system, but he’s come back a more patient person.
“I feel like I’m a lot more patient and literally cannot get bored. I can just sit here and not do anything and not get bored.”
The Appalachian Trail wasn’t Shane’s last long mission, and the CDT won’t be either. He has his sights set on a trail known as the Great Western Loop, which connects five long-distance trails and covers about 6,500 miles. He’s hoping for his Great Western trip to come together sometime after graduation, when he’ll no doubt be itching to get back on the trail.
The CDT is on the lands of the Chiricahua Apache, Western Apache, Zuni, Pueblo, Ute, Arapaho, Cheyenne, Eastern Shoshone, Shoshone-Bannock, Lemhi Shoshone, Apsaalooke, Niitsitapi, Salish Kootenai , Ktunaxa, and Tsuu T’ina peoples, along with the many other people and tribes that traveled and lived on these lands before colonization
