Friday 7/21/2017, 0mi/0km
A few days before the flight to Utah, I went food shopping for the trip. I mailed half of it to Wyoming, where I had arranged for a horse-packer to deliver it to us, near the midpoint of the hike. This way, we wouldn’t have to carry more than 5 days’ worth of food at at time!
Friday after work, I flew to Salt Lake City, where I had a late dinner at In-N-Out burger. For some odd reason, the Barq’s root beer in this state is caffeine-free. Silly Utah.
It’s about a 4.5 hour drive from the SLC airport to Lander, WY and the trailhead. I drove about halfway, camping at a BLM recreation area. Tomorrow, I start the hike!
Thank you for your awesome and helpful blog!! It looks like you hiked the WRHR as your first route after thru hiking the PCT and CDT. As I am a former thru hiker looking to hike the WRHR this August as my first route, what were your lessons learned as you transitioned from thru hiking to route hiking?
Hi! Thanks for commenting and asking a great question. It was a fairly easy transition but there were still a few differences that I stumbled upon. On a route, I’m focused on navigating all day and have little time to space out/daydream like I did on the PCT or CDT. Since I’m primarily using my phone to navigate (using Skurka’s bundle), my battery went down much more quickly; I should’ve brought a larger battery than my 10k mAh Anker. I also had a pre-planned hiking partner for this route (which I wouldn’t normally do on a long trail) but it’s the only way to have a guaranteed hiking partner. And on a route with some technical passes to navigate, two minds are definitely better than one! Lastly, because there is no guthook app (thank goodness) we had to carefully study the maps to plan where we were going to camp each night. Related – night hiking would be of limited use, because I often needed to use distant landmarks to navigate.
Glad you found it helpful! Happy to answer more questions. I usually write an “advice to Future hikers” post for each of my trails, but these earlier hikes I hadn’t adopted that habit yet.