Excerpted from Along Colorado's Continental Divide Trail Photography by John Fielder Trail stories by M. John Fayhee

The first man introduced himself as Delray Green. As the second man extended his hand, my jaw dropped.

"Hi, I'm Jim Wolf," he said.

Two full days from the closest trailhead in a little-used part of the state, I had just made the acquaintance of the father of the Continental Divide Trail. I didn't know whether to bow, genuflect or offer him a cigar. (It ended up he had his own.) Wolf was on a three-week CDT reconnoitering trip, and we enjoyed a pleasant evening talking about the trail.

I coaxed from him the story of the CDT and his long-lived relationship with it.

Wolf, a Baltimore resident who was born in 1930, is a lawyer by trade, spending most of his career working for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. He developed his passion for the Continental Divide while he was a child, and that passion is part of him still.

"As a kid, every summer, I went off to camp," he said."One summer, I went to a ranch camp in Idaho near Yellowstone. I fell in love with the West. While I was in law school, I became an avid bird-watcher, which, in turn, led to associations with other kinds of outdoorspeople. I started getting more involved in the outdoors. I ended up taking several trips out West. One of those was a 10-day trip into the Wind Rivers. That was my first contact with the Divide. In 1971, I hiked the entire Appalachian Trail, which instilled in me a love of long-distance trails."

"When I finished the AT, I started thinking about what adventure I wanted to do next. I heard that there was a study underway by the Bureau of Outdoor Recreation to see if there were any other trails that should be added to the National Scenic Trails Act. I started studying the possibility of putting a Divide Trail route together. I decided to make it my goal to show that a route could be established from Canada to Mexico basically following the Divide."

By the time Congress was considering amending the National Scenic Trails Act, Wolf had hiked all the way to Mexico.

"I went out West every summer and worked on it," he says. "But the goal was not just to put any route together. I wanted it to include as much scenery and cultural sites as possible. I knew, if Congress ever established the trail, that it would not end up following my route exactly. I just wanted to come up with a baseline or benchmark that would help the land stewardship agencies determine the route. I wanted to put together an interim route that people could use while the official route was being established."

It was Wolf who first scouted most of what has become the CDT's route through Colorado.

The unfortunate thing is that, despite all of his efforts, Wolf is on the verge of becoming irrelevant vis-a-vis the CDT. The Continental Divide Trail Society, which he founded almost 20 years ago, is being displaced by the newer, slicker, more heavily funded Continental Divide Trail Alliance, which has nothing to do with Wolf. When I asked Jim about this situation there on the side of Tank Seven Creek, he politely changed the subject, preferring to hear my observations about the parts of the trail we had hiked.

We arrived at Marshall Pass, which once was home to the state's second-highest railroad, in the middle of a thunderstorm. Though there are several nice campsites right next to the gravel road that crosses the pass, I knew from previous travels in the area that there was a small, primitive cabin only about five minutes from the trail. I'm not the biggest fan of musty old mouse-infested cabins, but I knew Gary would be very pleased. Truth be known, Gary would be perfectly happy if such cabins were strategically stationed along the entire length of the CDT. There has long been talk among folks (who should move without further ado back East) about establishing a series of backcountry shelters along the Colorado Trail.

This is something I oppose so vociferously that I cannot even get on the subject without getting a headache and turning even more contrary than usual. Surely, sooner or later, someone will propose the same sort of thing for the CDT. Why can't people just leave well enough alone? Why is there this constant urge among humans who ought to know better to build things in the middle of the boonies, all for purposes of "comfort?" If people want comfort, then let them stay at home, or, failing that, go hiking in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, where there already exists a fine series of backcountry huts. Leave Colorado's backcountry alone.

But, I must say, I certainly did appreciate the shelter that vacant cabin at Marshall Pass provided.

This cabin, which is open to the public, was the base of operations for a cattle camp back in the '30s and is preserved and maintained by a Salida-based snowmobile club. It offered a table, a woodstove (which Gary used to heat water for a full-blown bath), a nearby creek and, most importantly, a roof. Since the one bed was ratty looking beyond belief, I magnanimously offered it to Gary. I opted to pitch my tent and sleep out in the fresh air, where I belong and am most happy.

A few minutes after I set my tent up though, the summer's most intense rainstorm hit. By the time it moved on, the inside of my tent and my down sleeping bag were soaked. I spent a long, uncomfortable night, and Cali simply could not believe that, with a dry cabin 50 feet away, we were trying unsuccessfully to snooze in a completely saturated tent. I let her out a couple of times, and she ran up and sat on the cabin's porch, whimpering.

I felt much better when I learned the next morning that Gary had been kept up all night by rodents scurrying around the cabin. He reported that several had even scampered across his face.

After a tough four-mile ascent through thick woods, we topped out on the Divide once again, and, shortly after passing treeline, we left the Colorado Trail. (We would hook back up with it in six days.) It was like parting ways with a good friend. But, we had gotten spoiled by the high quality of the CT, which is well signed and pretty much manicured every step of the way. It was time to get back on trail that was CDT and CDT only, for better and for worse.

For four miles we stayed up high, following beautiful trail that was almost bumper-to-bumper mountain bikes. We passed at least a dozen cyclists, 10 of whom were completely rude. I am an avid mountain biker, so I try to cut mountain bikers a little slack because, like snowboarders, they are often on the receiving end of a lot of ill-deserved snobbery and bad press. Still, I believe every mountain biker ought to bend over backward to serve as an ambassador for the sport. That includes following the established protocol (silly as that protocol is) by dismounting and yielding to hikers, as well as exchanging at least basic friendly greetings with other trail users. Only two of the bikers we passed on this stretch of trail yielded to us. The rest were not only bad-mannered, but they were extremely unfriendly as well. Not one said hello, and most went out of their way to turn their noses upward as they passed. I was tempted to jam a branch through several sets of passing spokes but, since we were above treeline, branches were in very short supply.

As we began our descent into Monarch Pass and U.S. Highway 50, we passed a series of wonderful cairns, which were totally unnecessary, because the tread was so good. These cairns were erected by people who obviously took their cairn-building very seriously. Heretofore, all of the cairns we had passed— and we had passed thousands— were not exactly works of art. They were little more than piles of rocks, which is pretty much what cairns are. But the cairns above Monarch Pass all looked like miniature headstones. It was like we were passing through one serpentine cemetery.

I hoped this was not some sort of divine sign.

A half mile before Monarch Pass, we started hearing the racket. At Monarch Pass, there is a gaudy tourist facility, replete with a tram, museum and gift shop. Since it was Saturday, there were hundreds of cars parked there.

One of them belonged to my father-in-law, who, immediately upon laying eyes on our emaciated selves, let us know that, right next to the museum entrance, there was a hot dog stand selling $2 bratwursts. I had $10 cash in my wallet when I walked up to that stand. I had zero dollars when I walked away.

We were now halfway through our trip.

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