GDT kms: 28.1 (+ 12.7 on the drivable part of the road)

We had a nice lazy start as neither of us were in a particular hurry to start. We saw a moose on the road pretty early on, but otherwise the road was quite boring.

We ate our lunch in front of a snowmobile club cabin a few minutes outside of the park – it looked to be a quite nice little place in the winter, they had a wood fire-heated hot tub and a light up palm tree that looked pretty snazzy and reminded both of us of Club Mech.

The afternoon definitely drew on and was even more boring than the morning – especially once we got past the muddy ATV roads and were on the drivable road. I was definitely starting to annoy Kyle as I tried to think of topics to talk about to keep myself entertained.

After hitting 40km, we decided that was enough for the day and found a flat patch on the side of the road to camp in around 6pm. This area apparently has issues with porcupines, so we brought everything inside the tent to avoid it getting nibbled on – I’m still somewhat concerned we might wakeup in the middle of the night to an army of porcupines trying to get in the tent, but hopefully that doesn’t happen.

Bonus kms: ~34

It started raining around 4am and we groggily got up to close the vestibule doors and then went back to sleep. It was still raining when we hoped to get up, but neither of us were in a hurry to hit the road again, so we both rolled over and went back to sleep for another hour. When we woke up again, the rain had stopped, but we discovered our packs had pushed the bathtub floor out into the rain and we had a lovely puddle inside.

Once we were on our way, it was another boring day of walking with no evidence of vehicles or other people. It was well into the afternoon and I had my head down listening to podcasts when Kyle called out to get my attention – there were trucks ahead!

We encountered a wildfire crew and Bruce, the team supervisor, said we could grab a ride with him if we were willing to wait around for an hour and a half until they were finished for the day – we were very willing to wait! As the crew came in, they were all a bit incredulous as Bruce explained up that the random people sitting in his truck had walked there from the Canada-US border.

A couple hours later and we were in Prince George, checked into a motel and at Wendy’s getting the frosty Kyle had been craving for the past few days.

It’s hard to sum up this trip as it has been so many different things, but Carrot Quinn certainly captured the essence with

Thru-hiking will break your heart