A Note on the Text

The following entries are based upon my hand written journals from the Great Divide Trail. While on trail, I tried to write extensively about what I had seen and done during each day. More importantly, I tried to record my thoughts and contemplations. These entries are the basis for the material that follows and reflect the hand-written entries truly, only in an expanded form. I tried to keep the flavor of what happened each day and what I was thinking about, even if it seemed foolish or non-sensical in the security of a settled homelife.

There are times when the journals veer off into strange directions, or I begin to pontificate, or appear self righteous and elitist. I could have hidden these away, or smeared them into obscurity, but I did not think this would serve any meaningful purpose. Indeed, it would only degrade my reasons for writing. Long distance hiking is as much about becoming something different as it is in doing something and the mental transition that one make on such a journey is, in many ways, the greater transformation, dwarfing the physical. I want to impart as much of this transformation to the reader. I want the reader to understand, or at least to see, how the mind (my mind) changes during an extended period of living day-to-day and without anything, other than the Self, fixed.

I tried to clean up some of the rants, but others I left in the state that I found them in my notebooks. Some are confused and irrational, clouded by whatever I was feeling at the time. Erasing them or making them pretty would diminish them in my own eyes, and this is something I cannot do, even if they, at times, reflect poorly upon me. What follows is a true account of the latter half of the summer of 2004.