Updating the Northern Divide Trail

It’s been a few weeks since I highlighted my work on the Northern Divide Trail. During this time I’ve been busily reviewing the route, reviewing the resources, and making small changes. Right now, the trail is complete. The resources have been updated to their latest version, and a new resource, a textual guide, has been added.

The text guide is useful as a secondary resource. Broken down into days, the guide gives step-by-step directions for walking the trail. Each day includes directions which explain in plain text how to hike the trail, based on compass directions and geographical features such as streams, creeks, rivers, valleys, mountains, and passes. In addition, each day has an abbreviated table of the notable geographical features. Finally, at the bottom of the page for each day, there is an elevation profile. This gives the reader a realistic look at the hike for the day, and gives an estimate as to what to expect in terms of difficulty.

Besides the addition of this lengthy text file, I’e also updated the KMZ (Keyhole Markup) file, created in Google Earth. This is the file which serves as the definition of the trail’s route. I was able to shorten the trail a little bit, and reduce the number of days recommended to hike the trail by increasing the distance for each day up to 40 kilometers, whenever possible. I also took a considerable amount of time to shorten parts of the trail that were more winding. The end result is that the trail is now just 1000 kilometers long, and is divided into just 26 days. While this certainly increases the average distance planned for each day, it allows for more time to spend resting in the few resupply points along the way. The reduced timeframe also helps to finish the trail by the end of the best season for hiking, which is probably September.

Finally, the topographical maps are updated to accompany the updated route. This file is large, and can be downloaded directly from the drive. With maps at 1:20000 specification, this resource is good for finding the route in relation to geographical features. The route is traced, and the recommended end of each day is also marked. There are enough maps that each day is covered by about two maps on average. The maps are taken directly from the provincial governmen of British Columbia. Very often, the map at the edges of two connecting pages overlap, so it should be easy to trace the route from page to page.

All three of these resoures have been updated with proposed side trails to Pink Mountain, Tsay Keh Dene, and Kwadacha. These are the only place to replenish supplies between the Pine and Toad Rivers, which is the biggest haul of the trail if done without resupplying between the two. Reduced now to 15 days, this stretch can theoretically be traversed without taking a four (or more) day detour to one of the above options, but it is still long, and contains some tall mountains which must be climbed.

After Toad River, I played with several differetn attemps to avoid the steep climbs and descent around Nonda Peak, without any success. Alternatives involved just as much cumulative elevation change, and passed outside of the core of the mountain range. As such, this area near the Northern end of the trail may be the most tricky to navigate.

I’ve had a good time making the plan for this trail. Planning and calculating logistics is a big part of hiking. Planning a trail is entirely about that same type of preparation, which I enjoy. Though I may not get an opportunity to attempt this route anytime soon, I hope that others who are interested in hiking the Northern Rocky Mountains will take a look at it and give their feedback.