Hello!

I am beyond excited to be sharing my adventures with you! My partner and I have been wading through a logistical swamp in preparation for the Great Divide Trail; Permits, dehydrating ALL of our dinners, gear acquisition, and general packing. We are quickly closing in on our start date, June 26th from the Waterton lakes townsite where we will actually head south for the first day in order to touch the US/Canada border, then turn around and head north through the Canadian Rockies for the next 53 days.

We moved to the East Kootenays last year in the spring of 2021 and instantly fell in love with the area and all of the opportunities it had to offer. I, being an American citizen, found this life to be an ever-so-slightly warped mirror to that below the 49th parallel. I waited patiently for my residency to be validated, and waited….and…waited. I began a quasi-serious dive into researching thru-hiking, because if I reached a year here with no residency…what would I do? Not too long into the research I learned of the GDT and how it basically passes through our back doorstep of the world…In fact, I’d SEEN it, but had never known about it. With a little coercing, my partner and I were planning our first ever thru-hike way back in January, if we got our camping permits, we decided we’d do it.

Here we are, just a tad over two weeks until our first day on the trail. I did end up getting my Residency a couple of months before our start date and that has changed our intention of the trail a little, from “I can’t work here, so I suppose I’ll thru-hike” to “YES! Let’s celebrate my Residency and do a thru-hike!”. I hope that you will enjoy the (mostly) weekly posts during our journey through the Canadian Rockies on the GDT.