Day Three - Where's Owen?

Friday, August 12th
Although the rain had stopped overnight and spared the tent, I was awakened on Friday morning by the sound of raindrops. I was starting to get a little discouraged. It was cold, wet (the tent had leaked a little over night) and it was starting to look like it might be that way for the whole weekend. But I tried not to let the rain get me down. I eventually mustered up the courage to leave the shelter of my tent and discovered that the rain had actually sounded much worse than it really was. It was barely drizzling.

By some miracle we were able to build a campfire with our firewood that had been left out in the rain all night. We cooked our first meal of cantaloupe, bacon, eggs and toast over the campfire on a cast iron skillet. It was something that we would get progressively better at with each meal that we cooked. That first meal, albeit delicious, was not much to look at. The eggs couldn't decide whether or not they were fried or scrambled. It was little more than a yellow, white and black amorphous mess.

After tearing down and packing up our waterlogged campground, we headed west on the Going To The Sun Road over Logan's pass. I was decked out in full rain gear. It wasn't raining very hard anymore but there was still a lot of water on the road and the temperature was probably in the low 40's. Our original plan was to do some hiking at Logan's Pass before snatching up our campsite for the next three days at Avalanche Campground. Unfortunately, it was so cold, wet and foggy up at the pass that a ranger dissuaded us from hiking. He suggested instead that we do some hiking in the more densely forested (i.e. Rainproof) areas on the west side of the park.

Our first real hike in the park was to Avalanche Lake. It was a gorgeous 4 mile roundtrip hike through an old-growth forest that started right from our campground and ended at a lake in a glacial valley that was fed by 4 waterfalls.

After we got back from the hike we decided that it was time to head into town to pick up supplies for the next couple of days. We needed to get firewood to last for 6 fires and food to last 5 people for the next 8 meals. It was a tight fit getting that much food and firewood into the car, but in the end we emerged victorious.

While we were in town we decided to call Kim and Owen to figure out when they would be gettting to the park. Earlier in the day we had placed bets on when they would make. It was a 700 mile drive and if they had left at a reasonable time in the morning (6am), they should have been at Glacier sometime around 6pm. I guessed that they would make it by 8pm, Chris guessed 10:45pm and Sean guessed that for one reason or another that they wouldn't show at all. When we got ahold of them at about quarter to 5 they were in Butte, MT about 5 hours from the park. It looked like Chris was going to win the bet.

Despite all being tired from a long and hard day of playing, we all decided to stay up until Kim and Owen showed up at the campground. We burned through a whole bundle of firewood as we sat around and shot the shit around the fire. When the first bundle was gone, we were all tired, but decided to persevere. We burned through an entire second bundle of firewood before finally calling it quits sometime around midnight.