SUMMARY:  Studying the maps for our next section of trail made me feel very worried. Getting back to the official trail will not be easy. Then I decided. “OK, the trail wants to play games with us like ‘Hide & Seek’ or ‘Let’s see if you can make it to the top of this hill’ and more? Fine, we will play till we run low on food, then it’s ‘Sayonara, trail—we’ll roadwalk from here.'”

Today the trail began with a long, steep uphill, then it turned off to the right and disappeared, leaving us to follow itty-bitty cairns across the tundra.  Finally it totally disappeared and we had to bushwhack down into a canyon till we found it again, and now, at the end of the day, it has vanished again. It’s a game. OK.  And J-Ley—all I can say is “Grrrrr!”

DETAILS:  Last night was very warm, and the First Inn is cheap (which is why we stayed here!) so no AC.  As a result, a lot of the guys who are staying here (pretty much all hardworking blue collar construction guys) stayed outside their rooms last night (it was cooler outside!) and were talking to each other and talking on their cellphones till way late at night.  I kept thinking about the difficulties of heading back to the CDT today, and ended up getting up really early to study the maps.  We are planning to follow Ley’s Red Route, and it looks difficult in places; it even has a couple of notes to the effect of “this is the approximate location of the route.”  I don’t like the idea of “approximate” anything!  Yesterday I was really worried about it, but this morning I decided, “OK, trail!  You wanna play games with us?  You wanna hide out?  You wanna disappear?   Fine–we’ll play the game with you till we run low on food, and then it’ll be ‘Sayonara, trail!  Now we roadwalk.'”

Feeling a lot more cheerful after deciding that, I loaded up our food bags, and my pack, then Fixit and I headed out for breakfast–it was great.  Back to our room we went and rested till 9:45, because Fixit wanted to go back to the post office again, and they didn’t open till 10:00.  He is expecting a small package, and as of yesterday it had not arrived, so he wanted to try again.  In the package is supposed to be a new wristwatch to replace the one that got soaked during our Gila River adventures.  The current watch still works, but it has issues.  At the post office, however ….no package.  So Fixit told them when it comes in to forward it to Steamboat Springs.

Using Yogi’s map, we found the Ptarmigan Peak trailhead and began the Red Route back to the CDT.  The climb out of Silverthorne took several hours, but the views were fantastic.  We stopped for lunch at a really nice overlook with a bench, then continued climbing till we were well above timberline, and there was snow once again, but very patchy.  When we reached the junction for Ptarmigan Pass (our next destination), there was a very nice sign pointing us off to the right….but NO trail!  There was nothing to indicate the route except little bitty rock cairns spaced far apart on the tundra.  I thought to myself, “So…the game begins.”  It was good that there were TWO of us–we could both be looking for the next rock cairn.  For awhile, all was well, and we walked several miles across bare ridges.  Finally, we began to see a faint “trail”, and then it became a clear trail.  Whew!  We were very happy when we reached Ptarmigan Pass!

But on the other side of the Pass, the trail once again disappeared, except for an occasional cairn.  It was supposed to head east along a mountainside, then switchback down to the South Fork of Williams Creek.  We walked along the mountainside, hunting for cairns, which became fewer and fewer till at last they just stopped.  So did we.  I was all for, “Let’s bushwhack down to the creek and locate the trail there.”  Fixit was “No, let’s sit down for awhile and look at the maps and the Guthook app.”  So we sat down.  Fixit spent a long time trying to figure out where we were, but could not get Guthook and the maps to work together.  I looked at the maps and the terrain and made my own best guess.  In the end, we just gave up and headed down for the creek.  It was a difficult climb down, but not too awful.

As best as I could figure it, once we got down to the creek, we needed to go upstream a bit and we should find the trail there.  This did involve pushing through bushes and going through some mushy/marshy stuff.  But finally, oh joy!  There was the trail, crossing the creek, with a junction on the other side, exactly as it was shown on Ley’s map.  It was a very easy creek ford, and we were thrilled to have a trail at last.  It was well past 7:00, which is our normal stop & camp time.  We followed the nice trail for a little ways, and even better–it went to a large flat grassy area with several campsites.  It was obvious that people had been here in the past.  We set up our tent, because the mossies were pretty bad, and I also poked about a bit, looking for where the trail went next.  Not good–I couldn’t find it.  This did not bode well!   But we were tired, and it was late, so I thought, “Whatever–tomorrow we’ll figure it out.”

The sleeping bag felt good, but then I started smelling smoke.  Maybe someone else was camped around here?  It did smell like a campfire.  When I calculated our mileage, we only did about 10 1/2 miles today, but considering the late start (10:30 am) plus hunting for cairns plus a long time of map study plus bushwhacking, that was the best we could do.  I guess the first thing on the agenda tomorrow will be “Find the trail”.  OK, we have plenty of food right now–we will play along.