 It's like it's going to be another beautiful day in Colorado Paradise. This is a beautiful spot to eat Nutella peanut butter breakfast tortillas. You know I had never tried Nutella until I was 18 when I was an exchange student in Sweden and on certain mornings on the weekends my Swedish mom Annika would go and get fresh bread and we'd put jelly on it and cheese and all sorts of other things and Nutella was also on the table and the first time I ever had Nutella I was like damn what is that stuff? It's very good. I don't eat it in my day-to-day life but when I'm out camping I like it a lot. Look who came to say hi. Hey buddy. And now you're scared. Bye. Thank you Camp Hale for providing a safe place to sleep last night. I felt you Poppy. Here we go. I'm about 20 miles from Leadville. Gonna keep on going past Leadville and see where I get. I have no idea. These days are kind of crazy. But I can't wait. It's beautiful. Look at that sunshine. That's what I'm talking about. No crashies, flaties or whammies. Although yesterday I had a crashy and a whammy in one crash and broke my camera. Let's hope neither of those things happen today. All right here we go. Back on the Colorado Trail roller coaster. Up and down and up and down. Boy I feel good though. I loved sleeping there. Definitely felt connected to my my grandpa, my Poppy. That was a nice feeling. Born right here. You know it's all coming back to me. Two years ago I ran this exact same stretch in the trans Rockies race and I remember thinking someday I'm gonna come back and bike this. And here I am. I love when life comes full circle. This would be a great trail to mountain bike. I got to come back here with my bike. Might be a little bit more fun than running. Yes I said it. Biking is more fun than running. I cannot tell you how happy I am and grateful for this nice smooth trail today. I needed this after yesterday. And I know it'll change very soon. It'll be hard and I'll be hiking and grunting and all that. But right now so smooth like butter. I'm making some ground. Another wilderness detour heading me straight into Leadville. I can breathe easy except for these cars. But they seem pretty chill. Good to sit down. Got my daily greens. Restocked on tortillas. Cliff bars. Got some beans too. You know they say that pickles are really good for preventing cramps. So I'm trying to eat as many pickles as possible. I love this town. It's an old mining town. It's the highest city in America at 10,200 feet. And I love the old buildings. Got a lot of charm here. And I'm gonna come back in late August and run the Leadville 100. So I'm gonna get to know this place pretty well. So now I'm at the other side of Leadville and I was like you know what? I'm gonna stop and get one of these awesome Cuban sandwiches. I was here earlier this summer and I love them. And I also went across the street to the Leadville race series store and got me a new buff. So I'm all set. Now it's time to leave Leadville. I'm all filled up. Got resupplied. Charged up some batteries. Spent about an hour here. Onward. So that big old mountain right there after my right is Mount Massive. And it is massive. It's over 14,000 feet. In Colorado we have a lot of 14ers. Big old mountains that are all 14,000 feet. I think 53 or 54 or something. So I'm just riding along and this car is going really slow near me and then it pulls over and I'm like I hope this isn't a drive by. But it's not. What's your name again? Samuel. Samuel and you watched the videos right? So you just rolled up you're like I think that's Ryan. Yeah. I did. Right on. So why'd you move to Colorado? For the mountains for sure. Yeah. You look like you got running shorts on. Are you a runner? Yeah. Gonna go run up Albert. Oh you are. Yeah. Right now. Yeah. Wow. Okay. So he's gonna go run up Mount Albert. The tallest 14er in Colorado. How tall is it? I'm not sure. It's 14 something. It's the tallest of all the 50. You're the man. I love it. And thanks for watching my videos. Yeah. It's so cool. Colorado Trail and back to the up. You know those wilderness detours are great for cranking out miles. But I have to say I like being on the trail a lot more. There's something magical about it. Every time I hit it just the wheels sound different on the loamy ground. It's just comforting to be out here. And as a bonus it's so quiet. I love it. And it wouldn't be the Colorado Trail without a little hiker bike right? Yeah. It actually feels kind of nice to walk a little bit. Come on buddy. We're going up. It's fun. Thank you. Yeah. All the way to Drango. Yeah. Let's do it. Let it be more up. Or a lot bit more up. I think I can. I think I can. I think I can. Whatever goes up must go down. Right. You know what feels really good is when you're all sweaty after going up a hill and then you go downhill and the wind just cools you off. It's like built-in air conditioning or maybe you know it's like a swamp cooler really. That's a better way to say it. And for a snack I bought two of these bad boy egg and cheese sandwiches. And I'm very excited. It is 330. I've gone 43 miles. I'm making much better ground today mainly because the route has been very rideable. Makes a difference when you actually when you can actually ride your bike. Little mid-ride happy dance. Oh yeah. I'm feeling good today. And I'm eating a sandwich. Yeah. I didn't expect any tunnels on the Colorado Trail. Short and sweet. Right in time for thunder and lightning. One of the best smells in the world is wet sage. And I'm riding right through the whole field of sage. It smells so fresh. I know you can't smell it out there. But if you ever get the chance do it. You just have to ride your bike through a rainstorm or run or something to feel the effects. Wow. It's beautiful. It's like it's glowing too. It smells so good. This is like I call this biker high. You've heard of runners high. Right now I was biker's high. I'm surrounded by beauty not only sage but look at these mountains. That's crazy. Yeah this is a real deal rainstorm. I kept thinking nah it's not going to do anything. Nah it's not going to do anything. Yeah it's doing something. But luckily I got my waterproof pants and my jacket. I'm cozy. I'm all good. And the sound of the rain is kind of nice. This is what you call hero dirt. The rain comes through dampens things down. The trail becomes tacky and your tires has really good traction. Mountain bikers love this stuff. They live for it. This is pure magic right here. I've been kind of lost in the trees with my head down just powering up hill and I came around the corner and whoa mama look at this. I am now on another beautiful detour. Nice dirt road smooth fast pedaling and I have about 15 miles until the town of Buena Vista or as the locals call it Buena Vista. I see some sort of a goofball on the side of the road dancing like a madman. Good man. Very quickly you might recognize him. I met him at the end of my New Mexico trip just for about five minutes. So your teachers you have the summer off. Yeah yeah math teachers at community college state system bro. We stayed in touch. He finished the divide. Now he's riding the Colorado Trail the other direction and we've loosely been in contact to like meet up and here we are. Yeah man I keep going the opposite way. I know brother it's so good to see you. And of course the first thing we do is find Mexican food. Yeah look at that buddy. So the weather has turned and it's pretty rainy. It's supposed to be raining all night. There are every single hotel in town is booked like I'm willing to pay top dollar but they're all booked. We did find this pavilion in some town park at least to hide out for a little bit. I usually don't feel comfortable camping here because you're not allowed to. So we're gonna try to call the police and ask them if we can do it tonight special occasion because we're desperate but yeah this is this is not great. You just went on a search to look for camping. Yeah pretty wet out there pretty wet out there pretty dry right here so I'm happy that I'm back here but we're pretty much very visible right now to the police that apparently don't want us camping here so that's not good but we got some charging going on. So we've been standing here for the past hour. We talked to a local police officer and she gave us a very robotic answer. There's no camping in city limits. There's no camping but I'm like it's freezing cold. We're freezing cold. It's gonna rain all night. She wouldn't budge so then we've called all the warm showers host and sound they're not answering and yeah this is the first time in my life where I've been striking out this much but something will happen. Something good will happen because it's gonna be dark very soon. I really really want to be in my sleeping bag right now getting ready for tomorrow. Tomorrow's gonna be a really big day but not quite yet. Okay so it's 9 p.m. we've exhausted all options no hotels no airbnbs no warm showers no nice police officers so we're going rogue and Jeff found a dugout here at the local baseball diamond and never played baseball growing up so I haven't spent a whole lot of time in a dugout. I'm excited to do that tonight. Alright here's our home for the night. Jeff looks a little dark in there but oh there we go this is it. Jeff has elected to set up his tent here in the dugout. Good night my friend. Staying warm over here. Good night. Yeah our first night together and it's very romantic. I have I'm just gonna do this hopefully it's warm enough so this is not how I thought this night would go but you know it's an adventure and we're cozy and we're dry it's seriously raining still out there so very grateful to be in this dugout and I hope nobody messes with us tonight and that's that. It was a beautiful day on the road. Road 60 miles a day felt good about that I know what I'm heading into tomorrow's gonna be very difficult the next four days actually from Buena Vista to Silverton are rated as the most difficult of the entire Colorado Trail so gotta get my my sleep so I can rejuvenate my legs and my body and start hammering. Buena not just. Oh yeah this is some real deal rain. Oh god.