The next morning we woke, ate breakfast, choked down instant coffee and got back on the trail by around 7:30. The rain had ended for the trip but we didn't know that then, and we were ready to throw on our foulies in a moment's notice. We came to the end of section 3, tidied up in the Little Scraggy trailhead restroom and continued on to the infamous section 2, where some asshole human started the Buffalo Creek fire in 1996, clearing out 12,000 acres of Pike National Forest. The landscape still looks pretty raped nearly 20 years later, but for lack of forest it does make for nice, unobstructed views of the mountains. After crossing a forest road, the trail passes by a firehouse that has a water spigot available to all hikers. Linda and I decided to top our water off, even though we we would soon come across the water we stashed when driving up to the starting point two days earlier. I accidentally dropped one of the one-liter plastic bottles I was c...
