Ending a journey of 3,000 miles
Long-distance hikers find refuge from pandemic along Continental Divide
KALISPELL, Mont. — Sarah “Princess” Williams can count the number of showers she’s taken since April on her fingers, toes and two trekking poles.
“In Missoula I took two,” she recalled fondly while walking down Camas Road on the edge of Glacier National Park in late September.
On May 4, Williams started walking north along the Continental Divide Trail in New Mexico near Lordsburg, about 100 miles north of the Mexican border.
The Continental Divide Trail is the longest and most rugged of America’s long-distance hiking trails. It stretches roughly 3,000 miles from Mexico to Canada, paralleling the Continental Divide the whole way. By the end, hikers climb and descend almost a half-million vertical feet and pass through 20 national forests, several wilderness areas and a number of national parks.
Williams first had the idea for doing the entire trail — known as a thru-hike — in 2018, while hiking to Numa Lookout in Glacier National Park.
“I was getting ready for another backpacking trip and just thought, ‘Gosh, I really like this. I should try a thru-hike,’ ” she said. “And then it was true. That was my entire process of deciding. There’s no bigger purpose to doing this — I just wanted to.”
Four months, two weeks, five days and more than 2,500 miles after setting out, Williams woke up in Polebridge, Mont., with her hiking companion, Peter “Moonshine” Weinberger. They packed up camp, ate a huckleberry bear claw from the Mercantile and enjoyed their final 21-mile hike to the Montana-Canada border.
“I wasn’t 100 percent sure I’d make it to the halfway point, much less Canada,” Williams said. “It wasn’t until I made it through the halfway point that I realized it wasn’t if I would finish, it was when.”
When Williams set off from New Mexico, her dad flew out to hike a few days with her, but then she was on her own.
About 300 miles into her hike, Williams met Weinberger while staying at a Super 8 motel. He had started from the Southern Terminus a week before she had set out. A roller-coaster painter most recently from Massachusetts, Weinberger didn’t plan to do a thru-hike this year.
The two began hiking together and, other than a few short stints apart, spent every day together until Canada.
Weinberger isn’t a newbie to thru-hiking. He completed the Appalachian Trail in 2017 and the Colorado Trail in 2018. His trail name, Moonshine, was established on the Appalachian Trail, when he popped into a liquor store on a town day and all he could find was local moonshine. As the only hiker in his group packing liquor, it stuck.
Soon after meeting up on the trail, Weinberger bestowed Williams with her own trail name: Princess.
“At the beginning, every night after I got off my feet I would clean off, get all my supplies straight and neat, and I’d always sit on my mat instead of the ground because I didn’t want to get my sleeping bag dirty,” Williams said. “So he gave me the trail name Princess, but there’s not too many people out here to call me that, basically just Moonshine.”
The two hikers quickly settled into their self-described “boring” routine.
“I mean, honestly, we walk every day,” Williams said. “It’s not always exciting or an adventure. It just becomes what you do.”