Dear walker,Nature Steps: The Divide is on its way. It is our sixth app, and it walks the third of America’s great long trails: the Continental Divide Trail, from the Crazy Cook Monument on the Mexican border to the Canadian border in Glacier National Park. That is 3,037 miles in 35 stages, through New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, Idaho and Montana.
If you have walked with us before, you know how it works. Apple Health hands the app your step count, the app turns it into distance, and you move along the real trail. There is nothing to log, no workout to start and no GPS following you. You walk your own streets, and the Divide passes under your feet.
With The Divide, Nature Steps has all three trails of the Triple Crown. We want to spend this letter on what that means, and on the guide who will walk the new one with you.
The Triple Crown
Long-distance hikers call three American trails the Triple Crown: the Pacific Crest Trail, the Appalachian Trail and the Continental Divide Trail. Together they come to nearly 7,900 miles. Few people ever walk all three, and those who do are honoured by the American Long Distance Hiking Association-West.
Each trail has its own character, and in our apps each has its own guide. On the Pacific Crest Trail, 2,653 miles through the desert, the Sierra and the Cascades, you walk with John Muir and his wonder at wild places. In Appalachia, 2,190 miles from Georgia to Maine through the eastern forest, you walk with Henry David Thoreau and his quiet attention. On The Divide, you walk with Aldo Leopold.
If you have finished the PCT or the Appalachian Trail with us, you already hold one crown. The Divide is the last and the longest.
Why Aldo Leopold
In 1924, at the urging of a young forester named Aldo Leopold, the Forest Service set aside the Gila Wilderness in New Mexico: the first area anywhere in the world to be protected as wilderness. The Continental Divide Trail passes through it in its first few hundred miles.
Muir taught people to love wild country, and Thoreau to look at it closely. Leopold asked a harder question: what do we owe the land? He spent his life on the answer, which he called the land ethic, and in the app he walks beside you, talks about predators and fire and water, and says a few words when you reach the places he cared about.
There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot. Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, 1949
What the trail crosses
The app divides the trail into 35 stages, each between real places on the Divide. Every stage carries the history, geology and wildlife of the ground it covers, checked against primary sources, and the land changes more than on any other trail we have built.
Desert, and the first wilderness
The trail begins at a stone monument in the Chihuahuan Desert of the Bootheel, where water comes from windmills and stock tanks miles apart. It climbs into the Gila, the wilderness Leopold saved, then crosses the lava country around Grants and the red cliffs that Georgia O’Keeffe painted.
Crazy Cook Monument · Silver City · the Gila Wilderness · Ghost Ranch
The high country
In Colorado the Divide stays high. The trail runs for days above the trees in the San Juan Mountains, crosses passes above 12,000 feet, and comes down to the lakes of Rocky Mountain National Park, the park Enos Mills fought to create.
The San Juans · Wolf Creek Pass · Twin Lakes · Rocky Mountain National Park
Big sky, and water that goes nowhere
Wyoming brings the trail’s strangest country: the Great Divide Basin, where the Divide splits in two around a sagebrush sea whose water reaches no ocean, and wild horses and pronghorn run under an enormous sky. Then come the granite of the Wind River Range, the Parting of the Waters at Two Ocean Pass, and the geysers of Yellowstone.
The Great Divide Basin · the Wind Rivers · Two Ocean Pass · Yellowstone
Along the border ridges
For hundreds of miles the trail follows the Divide where it is the line between Idaho and Montana, past the trumpeter swans of Red Rock Lakes and over Lemhi Pass, where Lewis and Clark crossed the Divide in 1805.
Red Rock Lakes · Lemhi Pass · Chief Joseph Pass
The wall, and the border
The last stretch runs through the Bob Marshall Wilderness, under the Chinese Wall, a limestone cliff up to 1,300 feet high that runs for miles along the Divide, and into Glacier National Park, where the trail ends at the Canadian border.
The Bob Marshall Wilderness · the Chinese Wall · Glacier National Park
What will be in the app
Your Field Journal fills with 105 species as you reach their country, from the gray wolf to the mountain goat. A Field Notebook of twelve illustrated chapters tells the bigger stories of the land, and you meet 35 people of the Divide along the way: ranchers, rangers, scientists and the nations whose homelands the trail crosses. Fifty-four illustrated patches mark your progress, and there is a field note for every day of the year.
You can walk north from Mexico or south from Canada, choose from forty-six characters to walk as, and start a walking group with friends. There is a full Apple Watch app, widgets and Live Activities, and the app comes in eight languages. No account, no ads, no subscription and no in-app purchases. Your health data stays on your device or in your own private iCloud, and never comes to us.
One trail at a time
Each of our apps is a complete journey of its own, bought once and yours to keep. The Pacific Crest Trail and Appalachia are on the App Store today, and The Divide is coming soon.
Most people will never walk even one of these trails end to end. It takes about five months each. But a trail can be walked a few thousand steps at a time, from wherever you are, over as many months as you like. Three of them, too.
Start at the border. The Bootheel is first.
With thanks to the Continental Divide Trail Coalition and the volunteers who keep the trail open. The Lost Theory team
Walk the Triple Crown
The Divide is coming soon for iPhone and Apple Watch. Get a note when it arrives, and start the Pacific Crest Trail or Appalachia today.
Get notifiedThe Pacific Crest Trail on the App Store · Appalachia on the App Store