Day 132 (30 September)

Miles 2493.5 to 2515.7. Lake Sally Ann camp to Pumice Creek camp.
​
Rain. Not the whole day and not strong rain. But a constant drizzle. Nonstop.

When we wake up it is only raining a little. The tent even stayed completely dry. And when we stick our heads out of the tent we see Jandals, Merman and Montana. They caught up! Good for then. They have to be in Canada on the 5th of October. They hiked 30 miles yesterday and must have caught a cold because they are repeatedly coughing and sneezing. Poor fellas! We know we wouldn’t be able to hike to Canada in 5 days, but we know their style and they seem determined to make it. They leave before us. And we never see them again.

The landscape looks very magical in these conditions. The sun is rising and coloring the clouds around it in all shades of pink. We take our breakfast after only a couple of minutes when we find some good trees to crawl under. But oh man, it’s cold. This is not enjoyable. Let’s keep going.

We are hiking up up up and are completely surrounded by mountain peaks. We hike up to a ridge for a while and when we reach it we can see in the next valley below. The scenery has again changed completely. We are looking down onto this mystical glacier valley. It’s beautiful. But the cold is penetrating, we can feel it in our bones. The rain gear can only take so much rain… We decide to take a break when we reach the creek at the bottom of the valley. By now we are back in dense forest. But in order to stay relatively dry during our lunch we set up the footprint of our tent and place ourselves underneath. It’s not exactly cosy and definitely not warm, but it will have to do. And some hot food definitely can’t hurt right about now. Because Dario is the chef in our two-person team, I have the pleasure of doing the dishes. Which means filling our pots etc. with the icy water of the creek and trying to clean it as good as possible. My hands are positively frozen after that.

The only thing which helps is hiking. So we pack our stuff and start hiking again. It’s a steep uphill climb now and we are glad because climbing up is the only thing really producing some body heat.

It’s getting dark early now. The dark clouds don’t help. This is definitely not one of the moments I will miss once I am in a heated house, feeling warm. We really really really just want to reach Canada now. One more week till we reach the border. We can do this!

We reach our designated campsite, a creek, around dusk. There are campsites but they are very exposed and we’d much rather find some shelter from pine trees. There’s trees in abundance here, how hard can it be to find a flat spot among them?? But we’re also on a mountainside now and the terrain isn’t exactly flat.

Finally we find a small spot and decide to squeeze our tent in there. We quickly put on some warm clothes and hang up our wet clothes to dry. They won’t dry, but where else are we going to put them? Once we are bundled up in our sleeping bags, eating pasta and watching Netflix life looks already a little better again. Yep, the Great British Bake-Off is the most soothing and homey series ever!

​