A 3,000 Mile Hike Along America’s Continental Divide Trail

Where the Waters Divide, by Karen Berger and Daniel Smith

This is the tale of Karen Berger’s 1990 walk on the Continental Divide Trail (CDT) from Mexico to Canada.  As she walks through New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming and Montana (and a bit of Idaho) she explores the nation, its’ history and its’ people.  At the time of Karen’s walk the CDT was more of an idea than an actual marked trail, so the made there way mostly with maps and compass.

It a personal story of passion, blisters, searching for water, getting drenched by rain, blistering heat and bone chilling cold.  And some scary moments including getting lost, as she puts it;

“There is the kind of being lost when you don’t know exactly where you are but you know that if you keep going…eventually you will get hit a river.  There is a kind of being lost where you know about where you are, but it’s not where you’re supposed to be…There’s the kind of being lost where you think you can retrace your steps…and there is the kind of being lost where you have wandered off your map and onto terra incognita… the kind where you can’t even decide to go forward or backward because you don’t know which way forward and backward might be…We were that kind of lost.”

As she crosses private ranches she discovers there is more to cowboys than the stereotypes, and she comes to depend on, to some extent, the kindness of mid-western Americans.  She fights her fear of grisly bears was she walks through Yellowstone National Park.  And she does battle with the National Park Service bureaucracy as they plead for camping permits in Glacier National Park.

Overall it is a gripping story.  It is currently out of print, but there are still some sources of the book on-line.  Well worth reading.