Day 134 – 9/3/13 – 23.5 mi (2464.7)

The day started by waking up Ninja with a shower of balloons, an entire garbage bag’s worth secretly blown up by LoveNote and Burly, to celebrate her birthday! We also finally used the big 2013 glitter numbers Twiggy and Spoc buried as trail magic at Berthoud Pass. Well, just half the numbers.

Not wanting to waste all the effort that went into the balloons, Ninja bedecked her pack with half of them, a fantastic sight to walk behind through the mostly burned forest! We leap frogged with Bo and Mega-Tex all morning, up over one pass, then a nice walk along a creek the rest of the way to Benchmark.

At Benchmark, the main trailhead to access the Bob Marshall Wilderness, we needed to get to a ranch a mile and half down the road to pick up boxes of food we had mailed. Of course we tried to make this detour as short as possible, which included our own route through a barbed wire fence across an airstrip.

Part way up the road to the ranch, the owner of the ranch, Darwin, drove by in his truck and offered to take us the rest of the way, yay! We picked up our boxes and lounged on the porch for a while, tasting mystery foods from the hiker box. Darwin announced he was going into town and offered to drive us back to where he’d picked us up. Our lucky day! His rides saved us almost 3 miles of walking.

Back on the trail, we entered the Bob Marshall Wilderness. Tomorrow we will start a detour route due to fire closures on the CDT. Around 9pm, when I was already in my sleeping bag, Sweetfish rolled into camp, having successfully hitched into Augusta to resupply and gotten back to the trail.