Saturday May 29th

After cooking & eating breakfast, Ian took a shower. He told me it was tepid, which was a little disappointing. On the way out of the campground, we stopped at the visitor center to get maps and information.

This visitor center is brand new - it only opened a few weeks ago. It is quite impressive architecturally - there were lots of wide open spaces, lots of wood, and a floor-to-ceiling wall of large stones (which we later learned was fabricated - molds had been taken, and a very skillful artisan had reproduced the stones in plastic - http://www-personal.umich.edu/~ianjones/pictures/North04/North04-Pages/Image5.html).

We got a lot of good information from the park ranger, although people like him are not called "park rangers" in Canada. In fact, he said that he just sits behind a desk all day, so maybe he isn't a park ranger by any measure. He and a woman at the front desk recommended various nearby trails. As it turns out, most of the trails in this park can only be reached by boat.

We decided to go on the Orphan Lake trail (we'd been on this trail the last time we were here), and to extend that hike by doing part of the Coastal Trail. We kept seeing signs of our "neighbors" from the campground wherever we went - they always seemed to be one step ahead of us. Finally we saw them in person on the rocky beach which is at the midway point of the Orphan Lake trail.

We stopped there to snack and rest. The day was sunny and warm - warm enough for shorts and t-shirts. We bid our "neighbors" goodbye until evening and hit the Coastal Trail. The view from this trail was terrific - and the trail was nicely varied. Sometimes we were in the woods, and other times we were picking our way through fields of giant rocks (http://www-personal.umich.edu/~ianjones/pictures/North04/North04-Pages/Image8.html).

We followed the trail as far as we could before it seemed to disappear. In one direction, it would have taken us across some very treacherous rocky terrain, if it were indeed the trail. In the other direction, there was a trail of sorts, but it also seemed to end in a very treacherous way, so we turned back, figuring we must have missed a turn somewhere.

We were right - we had completely missed a hairpin turn at which the trail went steeply up hill. It turned out to be a good thing for me that we turned back - I was getting tired. By the end of the hike, I was in pretty good shape, despite the challenge. I was extremely hungry once we got back to the campsite, however.

We had our reward of sitting on the beach snacking and reading before dinner. We had spaghetti for dinner - I'd bought a bottle of gourmet spaghetti sauce, and it definitely "stacked up"!

I tried to start a fire with kindling and some wood I'd found at the vacated campsite next door, but I had very little luck, and gave up, and read by lantern-light instead. We spent one last night in the North Face tent, but the cold was getting to be less of a problem, since the nights were relatively "warm" (though still pretty cold) compared to nights in the U.P.
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