Mileage: 26.5km (1.6km on the GDT, the remainder on our route around La Coulotte)

Another hiker rolled in late to the Font Creek camp last night and thankfully didn’t wake Toothless when he poked his head over to our tent to ask if we had an iPhone charge cable. And then we had a brief thunderstorm (lightning strikes were quite far away thankfully), just as we were settling to sleep – somehow Toothless managed to sleep through this as well.

Toothless woke us (and the other hiker, oops) just after 5am, so we got going on our slow morning pack up routine and tried to get on the trail early as we weren’t sure the quality of our planned detour around La Coulotte.

Just over a kilometre on the GDT and we found our junction for Font Creek was very obvious, although not quite where the GPS track indicated. Thankfully the trail was in great condition and easy to follow. There were even lots of campable spots along it – if we had known in advance we probably would have kept going a little longer yesterday.

South Castle Road was similarly in great condition and even featured signage at the junction to Font Creek. The first portion of the trail is non-motorized access only and again seems mostly used by horses and the occasional bicycle. We saw a few bikes parked at a junction – presumably fishing down at the river as they looked to have mounts to hold fishing poles on their bikes.

Despite being easy walking, the road made for very wet feet as any bridges that once existed were long gone. This unfortunately made Kyle develop several blisters and we stopped for the day around 4pm.

We found a quite nice spot to set up camp in a small raised area with widely spaced trees shortly after the car access portion of the road started.