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.
