Great Divide Trail: Logistics we need help with

If you’re reading this, you’ve probably heard that we are planning to hike the Great Divide Trail in July and August. You can find more information about the route on the Great Divide Trail Association website, but the basics of our trip are:

• 1130km
• Planned itinerary is 51 days including 3 zero days (days where we don’t hike at all)
• 6 resupplies (packages with our food that we will mail ahead)
  • Shortest section between resupplies will be 4 days and the longest will be 10 days

Since this is a pretty big trip, there are a few things we need help with – if you can help with any of these or know someone who might be able to, please let us know!

 

Transportation to the trail

Our current plan is to fly to Calgary and then take a combination of buses to the trailhead (in Waterton Lakes National Park). Our planned date to arrive in Waterton Lakes is July 5. If you’d be interested in a road trip from either Vancouver or Calgary to Waterton, driving would be waaay better than the overnight bus! One of us is happy to split driving and the other one is a pretty skookum navigator.

Transportation from the trail

This is currently the biggest question mark and uncertainty for us – we need to get from the end of the trail to Prince George so we can fly back to Vancouver. The trail ends in Kakwa Provincial Park which is accessed by a 75km FSR. The start of the FSR is about 140km from Prince George.

Our planned end date is August 24, but that may change. If you will be in the area (or know someone who is) and are willing to spend a day driving to pick up two smelly hikers, we would be eternally grateful (and would most definitely owe you gas money + a favour in the future). If you are up for a hike yourself, Kakwa Lake is about 30km from the end of the FSR and there is a public cabin (check out this blog post from a couple who hiked the GDT last year for pictures of the area.

Mailing our resupply packages

If you like visiting the post office, this is the project for you! Since post offices generally don’t like hanging onto packages for longer than a couple weeks, we won’t be able to mail all our resupply packages before we leave and we’ll need someone to mail them to us while we’re on the trail.

We’ll provide all the packages, mailing instructions and cash – you’d just need to drop them off at the post office at the appropriate time and possibly swap a couple things or add gear to the packages if we need it.

Recommendations for musics/podcasts/audiobooks

Hiking is often times awesome, but also often boring and tedious. We’ll be loading up our MP3 players before we leave – if you have any recommendations for awesome podcasts or audiobooks, we’d love to add them to our lists.