Our goal for the day was to go as far as possible. We hoped to go as far as the Suspension Bridge which is roughly 9km from Devils Staircase (the trail is closed after the bridge due to flooding damage).

However we didn’t make it that far.

We slept in until 7:30am (due to a late bedtime) and had a good start to the morning. Broke camp quickly and had a hearty breakfast of chia seed pudding, cookies and a fruit cup for Toothless (and cookies for me, pop tarts for Natasha).

Toothless started to hike right away and was motivated as he climbed the hill out of the campsite. A few hundred meters in, he got to the top of the climb and had scrambled over a number of boulders and then became exhausted. It’s a lot of work! We took a break before moving on.

He was carried for a bit before trying to hike again.

I carried him in the afternoon and he fell asleep as we reached TeePee campsite. We had planned to go further but this already took us longer than planned due to the slow climb in the morning so we opted to stop there. We still had to hike the entire way out on Monday. By going less far we hoped to give Toothless an opportunity to hike more on Monday and enable us finish early enough to drive home at a reasonable time.

We had a bunch of time to kill at the campsite. We aren’t used to it! Access to the water is easy but we kept Toothless away. Once he went to bed, in his Peapod, we went down to the water for a while to cool off.

Then we came up and realized he was WIDE awake. We hung outside the tent a while in the shade and eventually made our way in but he wasn’t sleeping. Just before we got in the tent he got himself out of the peapod and waited for us on our mattress.

We realized he didn’t want to sleep in the peapod (despite telling us he wanted to sleep in it earlier) and so took it down. We had a slight repeat of the evening before but a little less conflict and more snuggling and less distractions. Once it got dark a bit he fell asleep…at which point we realized he is just struggling sleeping when it’s light out in the tent. He sleeps fine when it’s light in our car camping tent but it’s not nearly as bright inside as our backpacking tent. So we may need to just keep him up (or get him to sleep in the carrier) when backpacking. Maybe we could stop for dinner and continue to hike in the evening?

Eventually everyone fell asleep. Toothless crawled into bed with us early in the morning so that was a bit cramped but otherwise we slept well.