How the Wild West Relay was won and lost

I've never been to Colorado, but when the call came out for hashers for the Wild West Relay from Ft Collins to Steamboat Springs on the Beavers Gone Wild team, I answered! I also enlisted another Vancouver Hasher, Creampuff (he's the one in the red dress) because I didn't want to be the only guy from sea level suffering.
As it turns out, the co-captains are from Portland: Amazon.cum and Nice Snatch and their buddy, Rainer Queer from New York who picked us up from the airport after an ill advised day of trying to acclimate to the elevation and heat by climbing Beerstat three hours before!

So there would only be 5 visiting hashers and 5 locals: (it was supposed to be 7 locals, but 2 got deployed at the last minute!) Bridget, Matt, Clint, Eric and Thea. I 've done relays before, but only at 100km, this was a whole different event. Considering I was tapering for Stormy 100 mile, I saw an opportunity to get elevation and heat training in. And damn if I didn't pick the right day to do heat training. Friday temperatures were forecast to be a record high of 105 degrees F! Now given that there were only 10 relay runners and Matt had to drop out after his second leg, some of us had to run 4 times. It was me, Creampuff, Snatch, Matt and Bridget (bro & sis) in Van 1 taking the first 5 legs and everybody else in Van 2 taking the next 5 legs. Since I'm not psychic, I don't know how everybody was feeling on their individual legs, so this is the story of how all four legs went.