Mileage: 17.4km

It was a windy night which meant the tent was nice and dry in the morning despite camping right by the creek. Kyle took Toothless to start as this would be his last stretch with a light pack for a while as we were picking up the food we cached for ourselves this morning.

The walking in this section was nice and easy and we managed to make it within a couple kilometres of our food cache before Toothless woke up. He was in a good mood today and happy to postpone his wiggle break for a bit until we reached our cache.

I retrieved our bear cans completely undisturbed from where I left them and then we dumped all the food out to do an inventory and figure out if we could leave anything behind. We switched up Toothless’ food in Coleman, so we had way more baby food pouches than we needed, so we left most of those behind. Other than that it seemed like we would need everything we packed. So we left our trash, packed up our now very full food bags, and I returned the bear cans to their hiding spot for a helpful trail angel to pick up and bring to our car at A Safe Haven.

Then it was time to continue on and my turn to carry Toothless as Kyle’s bag was overflowing with all our food. The remainder of the HRT was mostly on old roads which were fairly pleasant and easy walking. The last stretch was a quick descent down a fairly brushy section towards Dutch Creek. Toothless was napping and woke up partly down the brushy section and wasn’t too happy I kept his nap hood up until we were out of the brush.

We reached the end of the HRT and got to cross the lovely bridge we first saw in 2018 and then took our lunch on the other side. Then we only had 4 more kilometres to go until we reached camp! This section was new to us as we followed a flagged route that brought us directly to below Tornado Saddle in 2018 to bypass a section of avalanche debris on the trail. It was mostly ATV road, so not the nicest, but the forested sections were pretty good. And the camp spot we reached at Dutch Creek was truly beautiful with great views of the Great Divide and a hint of the climbing in store for us tomorrow up and over Tornado Saddle.

A nice and early bedtime for us and we all tucked into the tent shortly after 7pm.