Day 8 Mileage: 12.3km

Day 9 Mileage: 0️⃣

The walk into town is always pretty uneventful with the focus on keeping our heads down and flying through the miles until we have town food in our tummies, and laundry and showers on the go. We took a brief break for Toothless to crawl around a bit at the York Staging Area which is retrospect was probably a bad idea as the road looked like it had been oiled recently. Other than that we just hiked and reached A Safe Haven right around my predicted time of 11am.

Alannah quickly sorted us out with our room – apparently another hiker who came in yesterday thought we were much faster than we are and told them we might come in that night, so it was already ready for us. We quickly dove into showers and made our list of town chores.

One of the big tasks was dropping off our food cache, and I needed to confirm the road conditions (listed as 4WD which can mean pretty much anything) and decide if I was driving out today or tomorrow. I had also received my notification to book my second dose of the COVID vaccine and could get an appointment for tomorrow, so it would be ideal if I could do the resupply drop today. The GDT Facebook group was quick with helpful responses as always and we figured out the ideal spot to drive to and it was feasible to do today!

After lunch, I hoped in the car and started my hopefully 3-hour round trip. It was nice and straightforward other than a few mud pits in the last 500m, but the Jeep handled them just fine.

We stuffed our faces at dinner and enjoyed some trail talk with Trash Panda before tucking into bed after some American Ninja Warrior.

Our zero day was then the weird mix of slow and fast that zero days tend to be:

• Toothless slept in until 7am !?
• Breakfast with Trash Panda and more trail chat
• Toothless needed a nap and we took advantage of the internet time to finish up blogs
• Into town to get the last few groceries, use the library computers to fix Kyle’s mp3 player, and mail our last few packages
• Quick lunch at A Safe Haven
• I drove off to Fernie to get my second COVID vaccine
• Dinner with a big group of hikers
• Then finish up our final packing and sorting out our itinerary for the next few days

We get back on the trail tomorrow – I remember it being exceptionally hard leaving the warm beds and fresh food last time around, so wish us luck!