r/CDT

I live in spectacular Twin Lakes, Colorado where we are fortunate to have the Colorado Trail and the Continental Divide Trail. For those of you hiking in Colorado this year, please please please do not use campfires or smoke while on the trail in Colorado. People are losing their homes and livelihoods because of forest fires caused by campers and through hikers. Out of state campers especially may not realize that Colorado is in the worst drought we've had in 20 years. We are living in a tinderbox. The Willow Fire near Leadville grew 1,000 acres overnight last night. The historic village of Twin Lakes is now at risk. Many people will lose their homes because one camper needed to have a campfire. Know the Fire Restrictions and Follow them! If you must have a campfire, then hike trails in another state where there is more water and less danger of wildfires. Thank you.

Hi Lander Trail Angels,

I’m currently dealing with a serious gear situation and could use some advice or help. I am new in the FB group "CDT Trail Angels" and can't post there without review of the admins. Hoping for better luck here on reddit.

I flew into Denver to start my NOBO CDT section hike, but my checked luggage has been lost in transit and is still marked as “searching” with no clear location or timeline for recovery. It contains some of my backpacking gear like my sleeping quilt. Fortunatelly I had most of the other critical in my carry on.

At this point I’m trying to create a backup plan: I will be passing through Lander in about 12 days on my way north, and I was wondering if there is anyone in or near Lander who would be willing to let me use a physical mailing address (USPS general delivery will probably not work).

The idea would be to have my lost gear and stuff (if it eventually gets forwarded or recovered by the airline) shipped there, so I can pick it up when I arrive in town.

In the meantime I am hiking with a mix of borrowed and improvised gear to finally start moving north.

If anyone is able to help or knows a trusted Trail Angel in the Lander area who can receive a package like this, I would really appreciate it.

Thank you very much for any guidance or contacts.

Heads up to all out there, I just read on Watch Duty that the Willow fire has resulted in closure of all trails in the Turquoise Lake area including sections of the CT in that area. It’s a rapidly developing fire so be careful out there and keep an eye out for closure areas.

I am a softmore in highschool and I am getting my first job soon. I want to hike the CDT once I get out of highschool but I do not own litteraly any gear I can trust on the trail, I also have never been backpacking for more than a weekend but I am confident I can cover about 26 miles a day. My plan was take the summer and winter at a community collage welding school then hit the trail and have a diffural ready so I can go to university after I get back. I want to start on the Mexican boarder and cross over to Canada and take the GDT as well but I am worried I won't have enough time to do both. How much do you think I need to save up for the entire trip + gear? Should I go solo or bring a friend? Is it a bad choice to take a gap year in general?

Hi! Im free from approx October 20th and want to do some thru hiking. Ive been looking at a few trails and section hiking the CDT seems to be the best bet. I have thru hiking experience and will have even more by the time this starts. I feel confident walking 20 mile days off the bat.

Any opinions/thoughts/tips on starting at the NM border and SOBOing around October 20th?

Edit: from what I can gather, it seems id be a little behind the bubble? I am happy hiking and camping alone, but having conplete solitude on trail isn't my game. I generally like to camp with people.

I do a lot of waypoint work on long-distance routes and kept running into the same problem — I’ve got a GPX track loaded, and I need to know exactly how far along it a specific point falls. A water source, a campsite, a road crossing. Measuring it manually in CalTopo or Gaia every time got old.

So I built a small tool to do it. Load any GPX file, paste in coordinates, and it tells you the cumulative mileage from the track start to the nearest point on the line. You can run a bunch of coordinates in one session and export the whole thing as a CSV.

A few things that might matter to people here:

**•**	It works with **any** GPX track, not tied to any specific trail  
**•**	Your file never leaves your browser — nothing gets uploaded to a server, it all runs locally  
**•**	It measures to the nearest point on the track ***line***, not just the nearest recorded track point, so the distances are accurate even on sparser tracks  
**•**	No login, no paywall, no app

Full disclosure: I run a hiking navigation site (Hiking America) and built this for my own waypoint work, then figured others could use it. It’s genuinely free — I’m not gating it behind anything.

Link: hikingamerica.com/trail-tools/gpx-distance-finder/

Happy to add features if there’s something that’d make it more useful for CDT planning specifically. What calculations do you all find yourself doing by hand?

Hi all!

I’m planning a 2027 section hike on the CDT from the Colorado / New Mexico border north to Wolf Creek Pass and am trying to figure out the best month to do it.

I don’t have much snow travel experience and would prefer to avoid needing traction, navigation through snow, or dealing with sketchy conditions if possible.

For those who have hiked this section:

• What month would you recommend?
• How much snow is typically left?
• Any other things I should be thinking about for this section?

Appreciate any advice or lessons learned. Cheers!

I am planning to do trail magic the morning of June 27 somewhere between Leadville and Berthoud pass. Any suggestions for good road crossings to set up at? I want to find somewhere with good thru hiker traffic but not too much tourism noise