Mileage: 16.4km

It rained off and on all night and was still raining in the morning when we woke up. It slowly lightened up as we packed up and seemed to stop when we hit the trail, but we still kept everyone in full rain gear since the weather forecast promised more rain and the trail up ahead was relatively brushy.

Shortly after setting off we managed to make our first navigation error of the day as we missed a junction and followed the Sunset Pass trail for several hundred metres before noticing. Back on track, we managed to lose the trail again shortly after and just opted to make our own path as it just followed the Cline River. We stumbled on a few campsites in the process and eventually rejoined the trail at the White Goat trail register – it looked like there was a decent number of GDT hikers 3 days ahead of us, but otherwise no one had been through until us. We knew we were well behind the herd, but this confirmed it, maybe we’ll run into some SOBOs or fast folks with a late start?

We got a few brief appearances of sun in the morning, unfortunately all too brief to help dry Toothless’ diapers much. I mostly just kept crossing my fingers that the weather forecast was wrong and we weren’t going to have 3 days with rain in a row.

Despite the off and on rain, the clouds did stay pretty high allowing us some nice views on the way up Cataract Creek which were very welcome after being stuck in the smoke since we started back on the trail.

We made it to camp at a reasonable time for once and even managed to eat and get everyone in bed before the rain started in earnest! It would have been a pretty enjoyable day if it weren’t for the stress about drying Toothless’ diapers. Tomorrow is forecasted to be wet and cold all day (a high of 2C at noon!) We strung up a line in our tent with a couple diapers, so hopefully they dry a bit more and don’t end up more wet due to condensation or something.