United by the divide

The lofty goal is a trail through five Western states along one of Earth's rough edges

US Forest Service Ranger Scott Segerstrom delivers laughter with his work instructions near Gunsight Pass. (Dina Rudick/Globe Staff)

WIND RIVER RANGE - At 4:30 a.m., the bright-white stars of the dead of night have begun to dull. Everything else, towering firs and tangled brush, shallow stream and the woodpecker's nest, remains obscured in darkness: mountain mystery at 9,000 feet above sea level.

Yet it is time to move, to shake from the sleeping bag and hike a 2-mile stretch of trail, racing the sun to a place called Gunsight Pass to watch the wild world wake up.

The first slow steps from camp trace lamplight along a lightly worn path, bumping into unexpected stones, detouring by one fallen tree trunk, then another. At a steep, sharp turn onto a main trail, though, the shrouded surroundings are intimately familiar.

At this spot only three days before, a volunteer crew - newcomers to the forested slope, mostly strangers to one another - had set to work repairing one small piece of the Continental Divide Trail, a long-held dream-in-the-making that one day may span from Canada to Mexico, traversing the high heart of the nation through five Rocky Mountain states.

Peggy and Barry Smith of Joliet, Mont., dug near the roots of a fallen tree, while other workers carted 5-gallon buckets of soil to nearby boggy trail. Scott Segerstrom, a burly US Forest Service ranger from Delaware, helped drop a log into a 3-foot gap above a small stream. Pat Foley, of New Mexico, rocked a small boulder loose, pried it with a long iron bar, then rolled it toward the gap. Others added rocks the size of watermelons, canteloupes, and golf balls, and soon a sturdy bridge for future hikers and horses spanned the free-flowing water.

"It's ridiculous what you can do just with rock and wood," Segerstrom said.

He stomped on top of the bridge.

"That's not going anywhere, no matter what you do!"

In the predawn darkness, the ascent to meet the sun accelerates away from the rock bridge up a gently rising section of the main trail. Sweet songs of birds - waking, or startled? - drift in the darkness. Otherwise only footfalls break the forest's slumber.

Five or 10 minutes of hard-breath hurrying toward Gunsight Pass end in a meadow of aspen. This broad slope, a 7-mile hike from a Forest Service parking lot, lies at the western edge of the Wind River Range, massive granite peaks jutting above glaciers and lakes. The aspen are invisible beyond the lamplight, as are a scattering of head-high boulders alongside the trail. It is time to rest, if only briefly.

On their first afternoon, after hours hauling soil and dumping rock, the crew ended their day here, storing picks, shovels, buckets, and pulaskis (a combination ax-hoe) behind the big boulders. It was righteous rest for willing workers who had come for different reasons.

"To give a little back," said Barry Smith, 61, a state banking regulator, elk hunter, and more. At his home near Montana's Beartooth Highway, Smith owns horses and two donkeys, Asster and Asstro, and their hooves have worn many a backcountry trail.

Brad Cory and Ross Branthover, 21-year-old students from the University of Denver, hoped to complete community service graduation requirements. (They had arrived in a BMW SUV and packed in an iPod loaded with, among other things, Pink Floyd's "The Wall." They also brought the best rations, complementing pasta dinners with summer sausage, cheddar cheese, and fresh pepper.)

Foley, 50, had volunteered on Continental Divide Trail crews in New Mexico and Colorado in previous summers. He hoped to round out his five-state effort with work in Idaho and Montana by 2010. During a break on the Gunsight trail, he sucked water from his CamelBak and surveyed the sweep of the Roaring Fork Basin below. "How can you not enjoy looking at that?" he said.

Smith, who has a bushy white mustache and a head full of stories - "I've been chasing elk for 50 years, and I've learned elk are where you find them" - often added to the group's quick camaraderie by playing the martyr. He answered questions such as "how are you feeling?" with variations on a theme: "a couple minutes from dead," or "slightly worse than crap," or "when are we not miserable?"

After stashing the tools at the end of the first day, Segerstrom, 28, led a round-robin session quoting movie lines, including many from Will Ferrell films, and a work camp classic, "Cool Hand Luke." Segerstrom rattled off, in imitation: "Taking off my pack, boss!"

Earlier, he had described his goal of testing a method in which Welch's grape juice mixed with iodine turns urine blue.

"That's what I think about at night," Segerstrom dead-panned. "Emerson had his whole 'nature through God.' I wonder, can I make pee blue?"

Little time for thoughts, or much else, when racing the sun. A hand-held GPS says the sun will rise at 5:43, but what will the Wind River Range's towering ridges and peaks do to that estimate?

It is not yet 5, and the first trace of natural light begins to brighten behind the alders, though only up high. At foot level, the cut of headlamps catches stone edges and the steep rise of the trail. After a switchback, three half-buried rocks form a border above a steep slope. Douglas fir and lodgepole pine again stand thick in the darkness. The lamplight flashes past edges of three fallen trees that had, until recently, blocked the trail.

While others were working elsewhere the day before, Segerstrom had snapped on protective chaps and fired up a chainsaw with a 28-inch bar. Though he grew up in suburban Delaware - "My house was right out of 'The Wonder Years,' " he said - Segerstrom was at ease in the forest. He had once led a Youth Corps backcountry chainsaw team and directed construction of several new miles of the trail in south-central Wyoming.

It has been 30 years since Congress included the Continental Divide Trail in landmark legislation, putting it in the company of other long-distance routes such as the Appalachian Trail, in the East, and the Pacific Crest Trail, farther west. This trail traverses more rugged terrain, following near the Divide's ridges and peaks, while keeping far from towns. Private property and public highways add other obstacles to completion. Though an estimated 2,100 miles of the 3,100-mile trail are usable, the trail remains a work in progress.

While leading the Gunsight crew, Segerstrom peppered his speech with back-country slang: "burly" (as in "big," or "tough" - "how burly is that saw of yours?"), and "bomber" (as in "excellent" - "we want to get some really bomber anchors in there"), and "bump" (as in "move" - "those rocks you've pulled out, bump those down to the rock cache"). He punctuated his frequent happiness by arching his back and howling skyward.

After a few minutes of calm effort with the chainsaw, Segerstrom had cut clear passage through the fallen trees, and Cory and Branthover helped him toss the logs alongside the trail.

Segerstrom paused and talked about the rewards of routinely leaving urban life for the wilderness, a habit formed on college hikes along the Appalachian Trail.

"Trail is just this key to all sorts of things you don't know," he said. "All of a sudden you crest this ridge and you get the payoff. That's what it's about."

Just past 5 a.m., the last forested piece of trail gives way to an open bowl, and cobalt horizon brightens above the ridge top. Breath comes in gulps as feet, still in total darkness, scramble up trail steeper than 10 percent grade.

For days, wild sounds have skirted the edges of experience: Coyotes yelping at dawn and dusk, migrating sandhill cranes honking down the Roaring Fork Basin below - "like the Culligan Man talking under water," Peggy Smith said.

Now the goal of the daybreak ascent is so near, only a few hundred more yards to climb. Will a grizzly search for a meal in a field below? To witness this waking hour is to reach another dimension.

The crew had talked about adding a wide switchback in this final approach to Gunsight Pass, but chose instead over two previous days to fill a drainage with rocks and to widen overgrown trail. One day, as they built a rock wall and began a series of water bars - angled gutters to redirect rainwater - lightning struck near Forlorn Pinnacle, atop Osborn Mountain, just east. Thunderheads loomed to the west, and Segerstrom told the crew to bump to lower elevation to grub trail, a simpler task akin to hoeing weeds from an endless garden.

The next day they returned to high ground. Peggy Smith, a lean woman who works in steady silence, finished building a water bar, then stopped for a drink.

"I am a little tired today," she said. "I think part of it is being 60. . . . I never used to get tired."

A minute later, she was swinging her pick to move soil for another rock wall.

The crew broke soon after for lunch in the shade of a few firs and fell into the friendly banter that comes with isolated living and shared effort. At the meadow camp below, days had begun and ended with solitary walks to fetch fresh water from a stream or dig a hole for a makeshift toilet. Such traffic wore trails to tents and a fire ring where conversations carried toward dark. Meals came most often from dehydrated packets, and were meant as fuel.

As the crew ate sandwiches during that last lunch beneath the trees, Eric Herbst, 23, a volunteer coordinator for the Continental Divide Trail Association, a nonprofit that oversees trail-building efforts, repeated an old warning he'd heard as a kid: If you don't eat the bread crusts, you won't be able to whistle.

Segerstrom picked up another thread of conversation.

"And if not, in that sleep what dreams may come?" he said.

He lay back and dropped a saltine in his mouth, continuing as he chewed:

"Boy, that's a good play. 'Hamlet' is a really good play."

One last scramble over late-season snow leads from Gunsight Pass to a soft summit. In a high meadow sloping west, seven elk graze. They pick up the scent of humans and warily skirt the edge of a forest until a big-antlered bull among them returns to his breakfast.

To the north, the thick blade of the Wind River Range angles toward the snow-capped Tetons, muted 50 miles distant. To the east looms Three Waters Mountain, an 11,675-foot peak that sends rainfall eastward to the Atlantic Ocean, and westward to the Pacific.

It is 5:30, and soon the orange-fire sun will crest the rocky ridge and its rays of heat and hope will chase away the silver edge of day. Cool gusts stir.

Tom Haines can be reached at thaines@globe.com.