Musings on a Quote from Carrot Quinn: Recent CDT Completer

I followed the blog of a young woman name Carrot Quinn (http://carrotquinn.com/) as she hiked the Continental Divide Trail (CDT). Carrot started at the Mexican border in the spring, but when she got to Cumbres Pass (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cumbres_Pass), to start the San Juan Mountains in southern Colorado, the snow was still too deep--and, according to most CDT hikers, the trail is not well-developed or -maintained, so, it's difficult enough to follow on good days--so, Carrot flipped up to the Canadian border with Montana and hiked south on the CDT.

On day 133 (14 September 2015) she finished her thru hike back at Cumbres Pass and wrote about some of her mixed feelings as she was finishing. Carrot is a pretty good writer and wrote in her blog about leaving the trail ... she said, "Tomorrow I return to the land of chairs, the land of things made by humans, the land where you don't hear elk bugling every night or notice the ptarmagins turning white or listen to the coyotes yip as the sun sets. The land where it doesn't matter if it's raining or if the wind is too strong for a tarp or how many hours you have before dark comes. The land where water doesn't flow magically out of a hole in the mountain and the nights don't rotate between silver-white and pitch-black as the moon waxes and wanes. The land where animal/nature magic is smothered beneath the asphalt, and a little part of you dies as well. The land where the stick-breakers don't dance around you while you sleep, in a circle, holding hands."

Carrot's quote is really special in capturing the downside to finishing a thru hike or any long hike. Versions of her expressions are how I feel every time I come out of the woods back to "civilization." We do occasionally get torrential rains and lots of thunder and lightening storms. We do get some snows in the mountains, which is always wet and heavy and dumps off the trees down your collar as you hike. We do get lots of ice that forms on the trees and melts and falls on your head as you look down for the trail. There aren't many bugling elks in the deep south, but there are hundreds of owls competing for territory, coyotes howling and yipping in the night, grunting feral pigs turning over logs for grubs and crunching on beechnuts, the ubiquitous crows telling everyone that you're nearby, and, of course, the stick-breakers who "dance around you while you sleep ...."  

Thanks, Carrot, for capturing those feelings we all feel when we get off the trail ... I hope you'll keep long-hiking and writing about your experiences ...

Colin Fletcher, in The River, wrote of the conflict between "civilization" and "wilderness" ... "Dedicated urbanites "know" beyond shadow of doubt – because doubt never raises its disturbing head - that civilization is the real world: you only "escape" to wilderness. When you're out and away and immersed, you "know" the obverse: the wilderness world is real, the human world a superimposed facade... The controversy is, of course, spurious. Neither view can stand alone. Both worlds are real. But the wilderness world is certainly older and will almost certainly last longer. Besides, the second view seems far healthier for a human to embrace.”

The continuing conflict between the "land of chairs" and the land of the "stick-breakers" is, perhaps, only in our minds ... but it always adds a level of reality that can only be understood and appreciated by those who have lived in both lands ... I am grateful that I have lived in both ...