Olympics Adventure, Day 2

(I neglected to mention on Day 1 -- we still don't know what that flash actually was.)

We figured that Day 2 would be "Hell Day" and that turned out to be an understatement. It was all uphill, despite what the elevation profile may look like.

We also made a detour down to the Seven Lakes Basin to have lunch at Lunch Lake. While this sounded like a cute idea, it was a tough climb down to the lake and a killer climb back up. I have informed Dave Hale that he may no longer mention the words "lunch" or "lake" to me until otherwise notified.

We hiked about 7 miles, hitting our highest elevation of about 5,300 feet (we started the day at 3,500 feet, for reference).

The last mile into camp at Heart Lake was a killer, with lots of up and down areas. Finally, we arrived and got the very last campsite, which turned out to be pretty nice.

I was so tired at the campsite that I basically pitched my tent, crawled inside, and didn't move the rest of the night. I simply stuck my bowl out of the tent to get a serving of chicken and rice (our best freeze-dried meal by far) and stuck my head out to look at stars.

Earlier in the day, Dave Hale spotted a bear about 400 yards away -- far enough for safety if too close for comfort. We went out of our way to store the food on bear wires, or at least Billy and Dave did, as I was too tired. Late that night, we did hear some animals around our tents, but no incidents.

The weather all day had been as perfect as it way on day 1, but around midnight it did start to rain.

Updated: Check out this map view, which is an actual GPS track recorded as we hiked (as opposed to the above graphic, which was a drawing of the trail by hand on a topo map).

Note that the actual length of our day was actually around 9.75 miles instead of 7! A lot of that was the actual path to Lunch Lake, which differs quite a bit from the map (way more switchbacks than the map would suggest!)