2022/07/21 Segments 2 & 3 South Platte River to Rolling Creek

Photo album - blogger doesn't let me embed videos from Google Photos, see album for some spoken commentary.

Thursday 7/21 South Platte we climbed segment two up through the burn zone. I remember a lot of climbing. At the top was a fire station before we began segment 3. There were a lot of through hikers there when we arrived. Mama Bear, Baby Bear, Mountain Man, Cherry Pit, a young guy from Oakland who I didn't get the name for, some other people. Mark was feeling really hot, like heat exhaustion. He did a wordle puzzle to make sure his brain was working properly. He was having trouble with it. On the third try and I got it, aphid. We had signal and sent some messages home. Mark started to feel better after water and food and we continued. Segment 3 was fun until all the sudden it wasn't. Sometime after Buffalo Creek I fell apart. It was like the worst bonk ever, no energy. I was irritable. This was probably the effects of altitude, though it's hard to know for sure now, but it continued for the next day. I had to stop, take breaks, eat some food, nothing seemed to help. I walked the rest of the segment. Arriving at the finish, we thought there would be water, according to the guide, but there was none. I was laying on the ground. A young bikepacker rolled up from the road, Caleb. He was on a Salsa Horsethief, fully kitted for bike packing. I wish I'd taken a picture of his bike, it was something I'd like to emulate in the future. Full suspension, minimal gear, lots of Salsa accessories. He was doing Durango to Denver and had dropped down to Bailey to get a burrito. He told us it was a 1200 ft climb back up. He gave us some good advice about the rest of the trip, memorably that we should skip the Breckenridge to Copper Mountain segment, segment 7. I still felt like crap. We talked about the lack of water, and he suggested going down to Lake Wellington, filling up, taking a dip, spending the night. We were planning on beginning the 70 mi, 8,000 ft climb wilderness bypass next, so lake Wellington made sense. It was hot. We rolled slowly to Lake Wellington through some sort of camp. Lake Wellington is a private campground and a lake, we ended up having to get a site way up on a loop, away from water, a dry camp. Mark and I did take a dip in the lake and cleaned a little bit in the day use area, then slowly climbed up to our campsite. I had a tiny bit of signal and was communicating with Jason Ferrier. He asked us if we needed anything, and I said that a shuttle to Kenosha Pass would be nice. He agreed that he would do that for us. Mark didn't sleep well because of a noisy family across the way. I continued to have insomnia.