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As day broke each person started to wake up. This was our first night in the huts together and there were some "adjustments" that each of us had to get used to. We were no longer in our soft beds waking up to the sound of an alarm clock. Instead we were at 11,000 faced with little sleep waking up in a sleeping bag laid out on makeshift plywood bunk beds. Once everyone was awake we started to boil some water for coffee and Aunt Jamima (Mark) whipped up some pancakes. We were experiencing our first morning of what would become the routine start. Wake up, wander around the hut, face the fact that you had to defecate in a trash can, execute the defecation, return to the hut, eat some breakfast, roll up your sleeping bag, pack your pack and face another day of riding. Just about the time everyone was ready to hit the trail Dave asked if anyone had seen his gloves. Everyone responded with a resounding no so as a group we searched for Dave's gloves. The search set us back about half an hour and resulted in not finding Dave's gloves. We looked in our packs, under the beds, and unrolled all the sleeping bags. When Dave came to grips that his gloves were gone we started the ride. We walked our bikes down from Hut1 to the main road. After regrouping on the road we started our descent from the hut. The road was basically a fire road covered with rocks so the descent was fast, but not too fast.
We continued on this beautiful road as it meandered through the countryside. The sights were magnificent. Rolling hills covered with green trees, open fields blanketed with yellow flowers mountains in the back ground and all of this splendor under a clear blue sky.
It was about a mile down the road and around the corner we came upon Rod. He
was taking pictures of us riding riding down the road. When asked about his
break away he was (still is) convinced that he pulled from the group. The ride continued on through the hills of Colorado. Every once in a while we would stop to check the map and try to reference some landmark. We found that on several occasions the map was a little hard to interpret. The text in the directions/map included descriptions that were not necessarily relevant to the trip, but on more than one occasion had us stopping to take a consensus of where we needed to go. When we were within a mile of Hut 2 we had to turn off the main road and on to a dirt access road. It was at that point we could have used a Thomas Brothers map. The directions were something like: cross 2 cattle crossings and 3 waterbars. Your hut will be the path after the 3rd waterbar. Well we rode across 2 cattle crossings, and about 8 ditches in the road. Some of these ditches were supposed to be waterbars and others were ditches. When we exceeded the mileage for the days ride we determined that we had passed the turn off. Luckily some locals were ridding by on quad runners so we stopped them and asked if they knew where we needed to go. They were kind enough to tell us we passed our turn off and told us where we needed to go. Upon arriving at Hut 2 we progressed with the ritual of picking our bed, dropping our gear and raiding the food cabinet for candy bars, power bars, canned ravioli, and whatever other palatable substance we could find.
By nightfall we were all pretty tired and crashed early.
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