pre-hike preparation time.

[Roughin' It]

Situation:

I might be moving to Colorado late this summer (Early August) and as it happens, that is a good time to start a thru-hike of the CT from what I hear. Also, as I understand it, hiking from Denver to Durango gives you a couple/few less weeks to complete than hiking from Durango to Denver. My thing is, I am not even sure if I am moving to Colorado or not, and when I do know, it might be as late as July or something, and ideally I would like to hike from Denver to Durango.
I guess my question is how late is too late to start planning for your thru of the CT? I am not much of a planner anyway, when I hiked the AT i pretty much just made sure I had the right gear and just hit the trail. (but of course that is much easier on the AT) My concern is about planning for food drops or whatever, or do I even need to? If it is feasible to just hitch into towns for the whole span, I would rather go that route, to avoid the planning.
Basically, if everything falls into place, I might only have about a month to plan my trip, and that will be hard enough with the whole moving process. I just want a little advice on the difficulty of mail drops vs hitching, and how much time i need in general to make this thing happen.

Peace

[Mags]

If you did the AT, you can plan for the CT. A month is more than enough time to plan IMO.

You can buy as you go with a little planning. As an aside, it takes most people 4-6 weeks to hike the CT. As an AT veteran, who is young, you are probably in the 4-5 wk bracket.

This may doc help:
http://www.pmags.com/colorado-trail-end-to-end-guide-2

Ask away if you have more questions!

[Cookerhiker]

Yes, the pre-hike planning shouldn't take long when you take advantage of the resources available including Mags' excellent on-line guide.

For this year, consider that 2012 was a drier winter and thus water will be more problematic on some of the dry stretches especially since you're starting later in the summer. I'm referring to Segment 16 through the first 9.7 miles of Segment 19 plus about 22 miles of Segments 26 & 27. Just so you know...

FYI one little bennie of hiking south/west is the free brew offered to CT just-completed thruhikers by Carver's Pub in Durango (http://www.carverbrewing.com/) - their own CT Ale.