GDT kms: 18.5

It’s impressive how much a poor ending can sour your views of an otherwise great day.

Today started out well – our little campsite kept us warm and impressively condensation-free despite being surrounded by little streams. We started the ascent and it was steep, but manageable. Since we started ascending almost immediately, my legs didn’t have any time to warm up and my calves were not cooperating. We managed to reach the saddle by 7:45am and got to enjoy the view of the sun slowly covering the mountains in light.

On the way down there other side, we finally found a trail! The trail down was marked with cairns until it passed treeline and was marked with orange blazes on the trees.

The trail ascended again to the top of a cute little ridge with excellent views on the surrounding mountains. Along the ridge we passed the 50th parallel – we can now say we’ve walked more than 1 degree of late latitude!

The descent from the ridge was where the day took a turn for the worse. There wasn’t anything specific about the descent that was bad – it was on pretty good trail and relatively covered – but by the end of it, both Kyle and I were ready to stop and camp immediately rather than continuing on another 4km to the next potential camp.

Unfortunately the campsite was also pretty horrible – it’s definitely been used as a horse camp recently and the flies/bugs were horrible (Cache Creek for other hikers’ reference). Hopefully tomorrow has a better conclusion than today.