Day 4

2am… I awake to a very heavy rain, eventually fall back asleep.
4am… The rain appears to have stopped, I fall back asleep.
6am: The alarm goes off, time to wake up, but the rain has begun again so we ignore the alarm.

7am: It's still raining, but I'm hungry and don't feel like sitting around so I get out of the tent and tell the other two to wake up. We put 2 backpacks in their tent before crowding my tent as I starting cooking the good old oatmeal breakfast in the vestibule. We hung out in the tent for a few hours, eating, talking, wiping up a few water leaks and simply wasting time.

10am: The rain starts to die down and we make our way out by 10:30 to begin drying and shaking everything out as much as possible.

We left camp shortly after noon (this time we had a good excuse!) and began the hike, hoping to make it about 11km (we weren't sure of the distance at the time) up the Moose River valley to the continental divide (49th km) for a scenic campsite that evening. As the rain clouds broke up we noticed many of the surrounding peaks were <a href="/2006/08_moose/4/IMG_4832.jpg.html">capped with fresh snow</a> from the night/morning.

Shortly after we left camp, on the fourth day, we finally came to the conclusion that the trail on the topo map we were using was inaccurate when we arrived at a clearly marked crossing of Steppe Creek not on the topo map. Knowing this earlier possibly could have saved us a lot of time as I think the map led us off the trail (or more along the wrong path once already off the trail).

As we went up the final portion of the Moose River valley toward the continental divide <a href="/2006/08_moose/4/IMG_4870.jpg.html">the views</a> were getting better every time I turned around. We were well past the forest fired areas and into thin trees and <a href="/2006/08_moose/4/IMG_4848.jpg.html">green meadows</a> looking up the mountain NE of us (the valley goes NW).

We stopped at the Slide Lake camp (43km) for a scenic lunch before continuing another 5km to a beautiful cam