In April of 2022, Jim Klumpp of Newton, MA traveled to the New Mexican bootheel with the intention of walking 2,700 miles north to Canada. While his primary goal was to hike the length of the Continental Divide Trail, he was also aiming to complete the Triple Crown of Long-Distance Hiking, having hiked the Appalachian and Pacific Crest Trails in 2014 and 2018, respectively.

The CDT was by far the most challenging of the three, with scorching heat in the New Mexican deserts, soaring peaks, treacherous snow traverses,
and afternoon lightning storms in Colorado, and plenty of wildlife along the trail’s entire length. He wrote in his trail journal when he reached the
Canadian border in Glacier National Park on September 2nd, ”Hiking the CDT was the single hardest thing I’ve done in my life.“

Jim will lead you on his four-and-a-half-month journey with many spectacular pictures he took along the way.

Jim Klumpp was born with a thirst for adventure. A day after his Wayland High School graduation in 1976, he and three friends hopped on their bicycles for a seven-week ride from Boston to San Francisco. By his early 20s, he had hiked all 48 4000-foot peaks in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, at which point he began climbing them in the winter, often tenting on the snow in frigid conditions. In 2014, he left his job as a software engineer to hike the Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine, and in 2018 he did it again, this time from Mexico to Canada along the Pacific Crest Trail. In 2021, he retired to prepare for the Continental Divide Trail, the third and most difficult leg of the Triple Crown of long-distance hiking. His 2022 thru-hike of the CDT nearly did him in, as he limped the final 1000 miles through Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana before having a hip replacement upon his return.