It got very windy last night for a few hours, but luckily the tent sites were well protected. I also saw flashes of light, which must have been lightning, but too far away for me to hear the thunder, which I thought strange.

As I left the campsite, I bumped into the ranger who checked my campsite reservation. He has a little cabin next to the campsite and 2 horses. The first part of trail to Twin Lake was through a valley with one small pass to go over before the lake. The wildflowers were lovely, but I saw some pretty fresh looking bear scat, which put some vigour into my noise making as I hiked along.

There was quite a lot of climbing after Twin lake, up to a ridge and then along the ridge, although it eventually evened out and was more gentle up and down. I really enjoyed this part, as well as this sort of ravine that we had to go through up there.

There were some even more amazing wildflowers after the ravine too.

After a bit of downhill, I refilled my water at the creek and then climbed again. It started to get a bit cloudy and all of a sudden I ran into a man setting up his tent off trail. He said he was afraid it would storm and a few rain drops did indeed start to fall. I continued on since previous showers had been brief, but did stop to shelter under some trees when it began to hail a bit. It stopped after 10 minutes, so I continued on but after a while some more ominous clouds appeared. Just as I got to a campsite, it started to thunder and rain so I set up the tent and took shelter. The thunder really echoes around the mountains but didn’t seem to be coming from too close. All of a sudden, I saw a flash of light and heard the deafening thunder not even a second later. That got my attention and I was feeling a bit nervous since it had been so close, but thankfully the storm started to abate and move further off. After waiting a while after the last thunder, I emerged and packed up to continue on since I really wanted to get to the next campsite to set myself up for a climbing La Coulotte as early as possible tomorrow.

I arrived at Scarpe and seem to me the only one here. It was hard to find water, but I did eventually locate the spring. I was sort of hoping that the guy I passed earlier would show up since he said he was planning to and then I wouldn’t have to camp alone, but no luck as of 8 pm as I write this. To make matters worse, I had tuna couscous tonight and it really did seem to smell quite a bit, even though I ate a little ways away from my tent. Hopefully thoughts of bears won’t be too intrusive tonight.