Dr. Mike Tracy

Despite his long, athletic legs, Powell High School Principal Tim Wormald was no match for 307 Health’s Dr. Mike Tracy while on a summer wilderness hike.

“I have long legs, obviously, but I had a hard time keeping up with him,” Wormald said after they hiked about 50 miles together this past summer. “I think we put in 18 miles that first day, and I was bushed by the time we got done with it. But Mike popped up early the next morning and was ready to go.”

Wormald is also about 12 years younger than Tracy. However, since adopting a section of the Intercontinental Divide National Scenic Trail, the good doctor has been putting on a lot of miles.

Folks adopt everything from good habits to pets and children. But a very few will adopt a section of trail that’s about a 20-mile hike from the nearest roadway. However, while attempting to do the entire trail system through Wyoming, Tracy decided to adopt a section of the trail on the Black Rock Ranger District. He has led significant projects, including a long stretch building a puncheon over some delicate wetlands for six days in an isolated area of backcountry leading past Two Oceans Creek, where the water parts on the divide and becomes Atlantic Creek and Pacific Creek.

“The thing I love about hiking there is, you see views of the Tetons that you’re not going to get from the highway,” Tracy said. “It’s just unbelievable.”

Dedicating his time to improve trail access on the remote section, Tracy picked the beautiful spot relatively few have witnessed. He has also almost finished his multi-year goal to hike the entire trail in Wyoming, which wends its way from the Medicine Bow-Routt National Forest in the south to Yellowstone National Park’s border with Montana in the north.

Established by Congress in 1978, the trail spans 3,100 miles between Mexico and Canada, traversing five states and connecting countless communities along the spine of the Rocky Mountains, according to the Continental Divide Trail Coalition. Ranging from 4,000 feet to 14,000 feet, the the trail provides a variety of recreational activities to hundreds of thousands of people each year, including hiking, horseback riding, cross-country skiing, snowshoeing, wildlife viewing, fishing, hunting, sight-seeing, mountain bicycling, backpacking, and other backcountry activities. Annually, anywhere from 150 to 400 ambitious adventurers will attempt to complete an end-to-end trek, called a “thru-hike.”

Tracy is not a thru-hiker, he said. With more than 600 patients (Tracy has practiced internal medicine and pediatrics since 2002 in Powell), the doctor might receive a few complaints if he took five-to-six months off for a hike. Yet, he has made time — usually in three-to-four-day chunks — in the attempt to complete his dream of traversing the trail through his home state.

The trail travels through some of Wyoming’s most stunningly diverse landscapes: Yellowstone National Park, with steaming geysers and volcanic activity; the craggy Teton Wilderness and Absaroka Mountain Range; the geographic phenomenon of Two Ocean Pass; the Bridger Wilderness and Wind River Range boasting 1,300 lakes and some of the largest glaciers in the lower 48 states.

Adopting the section requires Tracy to hike the trail a couple times a year to clear fallen trees and other impediments to adventurers having easy access to the challenging trip and to report conditions back to the coalition, who sponsors the adoption process. When Wyoming faced 100-plus mph winds in December, including 144 mph winds recorded near Mount Coffin in the Bridger-Teton National Forest, all Tracy could think about was how many trees would need to be cut to open the heavily-forested section of his trail.

“There’s gonna be a lot of work to do up in the hills again,” Tracy said.

Because the trail is in designated wilderness, where chainsaws are forbidden, all the fallen trees must be removed by handsaws.

Tracy first developed his passion for long hikes while growing up near the Continental Divide in western Colorado. Interestingly, he didn’t know there was a designated trail along the Divide until about a decade ago when he started taking his children, Anya, Nic and Amanda on hikes on the trail in Yellowstone.

“I basically grew up hiking, you know, covering 10- to 15-miles a day backpacking. I think it’s fun, so I got my kids into backpacking,” he said.

Even in Yellowstone, which has well-marked trail systems, the trips were always challenging. The Divide trail through the park isn’t easy to do because you have to start in Idaho, Tracy said in a May interview with the Tribune.

“If you’re going to go catch the trail in Idaho, then you have to figure out which old logging roads can get you close,” he said. “Then you’ve got to bush whack, probably about a mile or so just bush whacking ... to find the trail.”

He likes point-to-point hiking because “you get to see more” of the landscape than if you hike in and then need to turn around and hike out on the same section, his wife Karrie said. Mike especially likes the feeling of adventure when you’re dumped off at a trailhead and then they take off.

“It’s a fun feeling when somebody drives away because you know that you don’t have a choice, really, than to accept that you have to just walk to the [pick-up point],” he said.

After the couple’s children had grown, Mike started inviting friends from Grace Point Church, including Curtis Rohrer, Danny Agee, Seth Horton and Wormald, to go on extended hikes. On one hike with Rohrer, the two were aiming for a 100-mile hike in the Wind River Range but ended up going 138 miles from Union Pass to South Pass, camping at nights along the trail. Although Mike has done some solo hiking, it’s safer to travel in groups, he said, and it puts Karrie more at ease knowing he’s not on the trail alone, she said.

She used to worry more, but now Mike has a Garmin GPS device that allows him to text Karrie. She can also follow his progress online.

Tracy’s love for the Continental Divide Trail through Wyoming is due to its natural beauty. Grand and diverse landscapes of Wyoming offer hidden gems for CDT travelers, according to the Coalition. From wild horses in the Great Basin, the breathtaking Wind River Range and to iconic Yellowstone National Park vistas, adventure awaits. Rich in Native American history, pioneering stories, and evidence of Earth’s mountain building episodes, in Wyoming the trail travels 550 miles through deep gorges, craggy ice carved peaks, wide meadows and open desert plains.

L Fisher, director of Trails for the Coalition, said the adoption program is a collaboration between the Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, National Park Service and the Coalition. There’s a training program for adopters that includes both classroom and field studies. Then, adopters hike their sections, doing some maintenance along the way, and then contact the local land manager they’re paired with, all in an attempt to ensure the trail experience is safe and fun for adventurers.

The first step in becoming a Coalition adopter is identifying which segment of the trail you’d like to maintain. That can be a section close to home, in a part of the Rockies you love to visit, or a part of the trail with which you’re already familiar. However, not all Forest Service Ranger Districts and other land managers along the trail are currently participating in the Coalition’s adopter program.

If you find a segment that you are interested in adopting but it’s a region not participating in the program, those interested can fill out an Adopter Interest Form below and the group will reach out to you once the area opens up.

“I can’t say enough about how stellar of a job Mike has done,” Fisher said. “He just continues to grow in what he gives to the trail and how he champions it. It’s been amazing to see.”

That said, the Coalition also has volunteer efforts that don’t require you to have the stamina and strength of a mountain goat. Community stewardship days, lower effort projects that don’t require volunteers to camp in grizzly bear territory, are popular with volunteers.

“We’re also always looking for crew chefs that are willing to come out and cook on a project for our field crews,” Fisher said. “We have tons of different ways for folks to get involved, whether it’s on the community side of things by using your voice, or getting out in the field and digging in the dirt.”

You can view segments of trail currently available for adoption on the Coalition’s Adopter Map.

“Wyoming is definitely the place where we have a lot of energy right now,” Fisher said. “I think in the next couple of years there’s going to be a boom [of interest] on the CDT.”

The Coalition is funded by the federal government and private donors. There is some worry that federal funding could be cut, but Fisher is fairly confident in future funding.

“We are crossing our fingers,” Fisher said.

For more information: cdtcoalition.org