Donovan Rice, trail name “Iceman”, born and raised in Golden, CO, has hiked the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT, 2,650 miles, Baja to Canada), tagged all 58 of Colorado’s 14ers, and walked the entire Eastern Continental Trail (ECT, 5,700 miles, Florida Keys to Newfoundland).
But it was during his thru-hike of the Continental Divide Trail (CDT, 3,100 miles, Mexico to Canada), when he stood at the Colorado-Wyoming border, looking back south at those Rocky Mountain ridgelines he’d seen from the Divide spine, that he first thought about some kind of epic 1,000-plus-mile route in Colorado.
When he got home, he designed one.
This week, Rice departs on the first-ever attempt of what he has named the The Great Colorado Route—a 1,700-mile thru-hike of his own design, taking a “maximalist approach” to link as much of Colorado’s most incredible hiking terrain as possible into a single continuous route.
The Great Colorado Route, by the numbers: 1,700 miles (2,736 km), 381,000 feet of gain (thirteen Everests), 32 sections, all 11 national forests, 29 wilderness areas, 13 fourteeners, 47 thirteeners. He expects it to take four months.
His opening move: dropping into Pinyon Draw on the North Rim, a steep descent to the Gunnison River, before pushing through the Gunnison Gorge. From there, Colorado awaits for the next four months. Among his real concerns heading out: water access, given this year’s low snowpack across the state.
He’ll leave May 13 from Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park—timed strategically to dodge mud season and summer heat elsewhere in the state. Actually, timing this hike is not that simple. Avoiding the mud leads to other concessions.
“It’s a tradeoff to complete the desert while it still has water and give San Juans time to melt off some,” Rice explains. “Will also for sure hit the San Juans while sun cups and snow chutes are still there. It’s all about finding the best compromise where you can’t hit everywhere during the ideal season, so you go with what’s the most workable.”
Baked into the line are personal bucket-list objectives Rice has never completed—including the Ruby Range Traverse near Crested Butte, the Sangre de Cristo Range traverse, and a non-Class-V passage through the Gore Range.
“I hope I enjoy hiking it as much as I’ve enjoyed planning it,” he told me in a phone interview a few days before his departure.
The GCR isn’t meant to compete with the Colorado Trail or CDT, two other long distance trails in the state. It goes deeper—into the less-traveled wilderness corners, that you can only glimpse from the ridges of those already established routes. The Iceman is blazing his own.
You can follow, either on Instagram, or by foot; he’s posting all the map details and decisions as he goes.
Join him here: @greatcoloradoroute / GreatColoradoRoute.com—
—Joshua Berman is the author of Moon Colorado Hiking and Director of Outdoor Education at Shining Mountain Waldorf School. His website is https://joshuaberman.net/
