15-08-18. Day 129. Straight Line Creek – Mark Trail CDT
Hiking the Continental Divide Trail
Mark Trail CDT 2015
Normal morning, Coffee, Banana, hike. The clouds were pouring over the peaks. Soon I was in the clouds with cold strong winds. The cold wind would cool my glasses and the moisture coming out of the neck of my rain coat fogged my glasses. Between my foggy glasses and being in the clouds, I couldn’t see a thing. Then I lost the trail ….. I rely on Backcountry Navigator to locate myself time and time again. I have no idea how you could hike this trail without it.
Soon I was descending to Black creek and the Dearborn River. I followed the Drearborn river up stream to where Welcome Pass come together. Straight Line Pass then Straight Line Creek. It was really in a straight line. The hiking was much easier than yesterday and I was making up for yesterday’s slow day.
I found a flat spot near Green Fork Guard Station and quickly fell asleep……After I blogged this.
Near Green Fork Guard Station. 27 miles
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MarkTrail 
How do you use backcountry navigator? down you pre download all the maps or is it just for getting the gps coordinates?
Daniel, Great Question. Before I started to hike, I downloaded maps for each state. Also found some premade maps and downloaded them. I put them all on an 64gb external card. I downloaded multiple tracks and way point files I found on the internet. After I started to hike, I kept my phone in airplane mode, set the power options to save battey, turned off all background data. This way the battery lasted 2 days. I had 2 backup batteries and also blogged every day. I would turn on the phone on in the morning, leave the backcountry Navagtor App up, and toggle the screen on to see if I was off “route” every 30 minutes. I also used the “go to” function to cross country to find water.
Did I answer your question? If so, could you help me by sharing how ever you got to this page with whomever you can? I will be blogging starting 4/1 as I bicycle across the US as my next adventure… Thanks for reading and Rock on!!!