July 21st
Along Forest Rd 5mi Before Dubois(1748.1)-US 287/Dubois(1753.2)
5.1mi
I had my alarm set for 6am this morning and I heard Bloodbath well before that. He was doing all he could to get Rampage up and out as early as possible today. He LOVES getting breakfast on a nero. A nero is a near zero mile day. He was very happy that we were just 5mi from the highway this morning. We got to the highway at 8:30am and got a hitch in only 10mins. We are on a roll! A truck pulled over and offered to let us ride the 28mi to Dubois in the bed of the truck. It was great!
We knew exactly where we were headed…to the Cowboy Cafe for breakfast! Right when we got there, who did we see, but no other than the reappearing Cherry Picker. We had a wonderful breakfast!
We were determined to get all our town chores done today so that tomorrow could be a full zero of nothing but relaxing! We showered for the first time in 7 days and did laundry for the first time in 11 days! It was wonderful! We went to the grocery store and bought what we’d need for our resupply and also for the next two days so we can minimize leaving the room. When we checked into our motel, we got to meet some of the “herd” at the front of the pack. We met Neon, E, Gnar, and Pod. All started a few days to almost two weeks before us and they have enjoyed the trail towns along the way. They had neroed and zeroed already and were headed out today, so they are still two days ahead of us, but it was nice to meet them after seeing their names in the registers all trail. Later in the day, Highlife came in and we met him for the first time too. He also started a couple weeks before us. We have counted about 20 people ahead and four of them are females (including E, Neon, and Pod). Only Mtn Rat started after us and he is on track to be the fastest to do the CDT this year. His schedule now has him finishing on Sept 18th. That is so awesome and it was great to be able to do a leg with him.
The wifi here is pretty slow and I had to manually use my laptop I had sent here to reenter each picture from the last few posts, so you’ll notice they may look bigger. Apparently, Dubois is one of the most remote cities, in that there isn’t another major town for 80mi in any direction. I’m going to do my best to load my videos and pictures from this section tomorrow. I have a lot of people emailing me to do a special post about my gear review thus far and the electronics I’ve been using along the trail…I hope to have time to do that as my post tomorrow. So happy to be showered and with my laptop. Gonna love tomorrow’s zero!
