Most thru-hikers tick off a famous trail and call it done. Donovan Rice, who already has the Pacific Crest and Continental Divide Trails under his belt, decided Colorado deserved more — so he invented his own 3,252km route around the entire state and spent 141 days proving it can be walked.
Rice — trail name Iceman — started with pins on a map: every ridge, peak and park he wished the Continental Divide Trail had touched when he hiked its 700-mile Colorado stretch. Stitching existing trails together with new cross-country links, he built the Great Colorado Route around three principles: beauty, breadth and epicness. The result sprawls across all 11 of Colorado's national forests, three national parks, 13 of the state's famous 14,000-foot summits and another 47 peaks above 13,000 feet. Rice cheerfully admits it's not an efficient line — you could circle the state border plus hike the Colorado Trail and still log fewer kilometres.
He set off from Gunnison National Park on May 14 with just six kilos of gear — a tarp instead of a tent, a quilt instead of a sleeping bag — and finished on October 1 after 141 days. The hardest stretch, he says, runs between Bailey and Rocky Mountain National Park, over the Mount Evans Wilderness and the Front Range, then across the punishing Gore Range. There's plenty of Class 3 scrambling and constant off-trail navigation, though no actual climbing: he capped the difficulty at anything that would require ropes. He carried an ice ax, micro-spikes and a helmet for rockfall, and designed the route with easier sections between the brutal ones so hikers can recover.
The practical snag was land access. Unlike the UK, Colorado has no right to roam, so Rice had to thread public lands together, occasionally resorting to short road walks where private property blocked the way.
Now he's building a website mapping the route in 29 segments with GPS coordinates, camping spots and alternates for bad conditions. His hope: other hikers will try it — whether as a full four-and-a-half-month expedition (realistically May to October, with bailouts along the way) or, more manageably, as single segments. It's explicitly not beginner-friendly, but it doesn't demand mountaineering skills either. For adventurous hikers who've outgrown the Colorado Trail and want something genuinely new, this is the most exciting route the state has seen in years.
Story via ExplorersWeb.
