Although I slept well, it was apparently a restless night for many others. People found themselves gasping for air throughout the night, no doubt a result of the altitude. Brian referred to the group’s night of sleep as an “orchestra” of various noises and loud snoring. Good thing I sleep like a rock!

Rested or not, we awoke the next morning, ate breakfast, packed up our gear, and were on the trail by 8:30 AM. We started by walking our bikes down the hill a bit (in a different direction from the steep hill we had to push our bikes up the prior day), not because it was too technical, but because the directions said so, probably for erosion control reasons.

Shortly afterwards, we were able to ride down the semi-twisty trail and reached Last Dollar Road again. We bombed down a nice, long descent, and soon had the first cow sighting of many, many more to come. We rode past the ranch where the John Wayne movie “True Grit” was filmed. I’ve never even seen a John Wayne movie let alone know of that specific one, but it was neat nevertheless to ride by it.

The riding today was far easier than the day before, consisting primarily of gently rolling hills on dirt roads or double track. The weather was a bit cloudier, but they weren’t storm clouds and we didn’t worry too much about rain. All in all, it was a nice change from the previous day.

As we cruised along, Ryan and I started noticing that the mileage in the directions was off by a bit. According to the directions and our odometers, there was supposed to be a left turn but we didn’t see it. We had been riding uphill for a while and had reached the top of the hill. Either the left turn was further ahead at the bottom of the hill or we had passed it. Ryan and I decided to go on ahead down the hill to investigate while Brian would stop and wait at the top of the hill with the rest of the group. If we had passed the turn, we didn’t want the people with the trailers to go down the hill and then have to turn around and climb up it.

When we reached the bottom of the hill, we found the turn. We had regained our bearings so we tried signaling to Brian, but he was too far away to see. After several minutes, Brian decided to ride halfway down the hill, find out which way we were supposed to go, and then signal back up the hill to the rest of the group. That worked and the group was soon back together at the bottom of the hill. When Judy pulled up with the trailer, she tried to unclip, couldn’t, and fell over on her side. Slightly painful, but nothing too bad.

After a few more miles on the dirt roads, we reached a highway where we descended a bit before turning right onto another dirt road. From here, we started climbing. It wasn’t very steep, just a long and sustained low-grade climb.

Our next landmark was an “Aspen corrale” surrounding a black hose. We were supposed to fill up all our water with the black hose before continuing on towards the hut. We came upon a clearing on the side of the road surrounded by Aspens. It seemed like this could be an Aspen corrale so we hopped off our bikes to look for the black hose but didn’t find it.

So continued further down the road and soon came upon the black hose. It was on the rightside, only a few feet from the road. It was next to a horse corrale, a traditional one made from pieces of wood. While there were Aspen trees interspersed through the corrale, I wouldn’t have called it an “Aspen corrale”, but something more along the lines of a “horse carrale with Aspens in it”. Semantics shemantics.

We began filling up our water bottles and Camelbacks. Quite inadvertently, I almost gave Brian a mini shower. I was using a brand new Platypus backpack for this trip which, unsurprisingly, uses a Platypus bladder. These bladders are unique in that they seal shut like a big Ziploc bag. The directions say that once you’ve sealed the bladder, you should flip it upside down just to make sure that the seal is intact. So that’s what I did. The problem is that the zip seal wasn’t intact and as I flipped it upside down, the seal opened and I almost drenched Brian. No damage was down; it was more amusing than anything. We all had a good laugh, especially since Dave had predicted that I’d have an accident with the Platypus bladder before the trip was over.

While we were filling up, a maroon truck drove up the road. As is typical, we moved to the side of the road to ensure that there was plenty of room for the the vehicle to pass. The truck slowed down as it approached us and then stopped. Brian. his back turned to the truck, was somewhat annoyed because there was plenty of room for the truck to pass. It turned out that the guys in the truck were from the San Juan Huts and were actually driving up to our hut to restock it. We chatted with them for a while and then let them go. We’d see them again before too long when we arrived at the hut.

After everyone had filled up, we continued on to the hut, getting in around 1:30 PM. We were greeted at the hut by not only the two guys in the truck, but their big dog as well. It was a really cool dog! It was really big and we were told that it was about 87% wolf and the rest Malamute. Despite being such a large percentage wolf, it was really mellow and friendly.

We helped the guys lug down some water jugs and they soon left. Everyone agreed that Hut #2 was really cool. It was layed out nicely and seemed to make optimum use of space. We had some time to kill, some of which was spent watching Ryan perform stupid human tricks on the hanging horizontal log in front of the hut.

Judy helped set the tone for the evening by replying to the simple “Where did you go?” with “I went to take a goddamn motherfucking shit. What the fuck is it to you?” Or something like that. After being laughed at, Judy decided to modify her terminology to something a bit less crass like “I went to drop off a few kids at the pool”.

Chef Robere was called into action to cook up some pasta. The amount of noodles came out just right, but we made way too much sauce. We ended up having to pour the extra sauce into zip-lock bags and throwing them away.

As we sat on the picnic table that would flip over whenever someone got up on one side, Dave and I tried to figure out how to get our odometers (we have the same one) to measure dual distances. Judy claimed to have figured out the most efficient way to set the computer, although we figured out soon after that her method involved the pressing of a button that, in reality, does nothing. We were happy to figure out how to use this function because I had been keeping track of cumulative trip miles but also wanted to keep track of the miles on a daily basis.

With a belly full of pasta, we hit the sack shortly after it got dark.

Cumulative miles: 40.92
Daily miles: 27.5
Mechanicals: None
Casualties: Judy fall (couldn’t unclip)

[Go to Day 3 trip report or go to pics.]

Posted by Roger at 9:08 pm.