I slept quite well thankfully and met my campsite mates in the morning, a couple who are doing section A and had come down off Barnaby ridge when they realized they wouldn’t make it to the Barnaby lake campsite. They told me of an 8 meter cliff up there that you have to climb up/down although there are cables to help. What they had to say didn’t make me regret my choice not to do that alternate. After packing up and having breakfast, I headed to the main building of the ski resort since the couple had said there should be free wifi. I used it to check the weather, no storm today, but very likely again tomorrow. After this I headed to the trail that followed a river and was quite flat. The plants were so wet and overgrew the trail, which was also wet and a bit muddy in places so I got soaked and had wet feet.

After meeting up with the Barnaby alternate trail, there was a short road walk and then it was back onto the trail for the only real climb of the day. I decided to fill up with 3 liters of water since it’s hot today and there isn’t water on the map for about 13km. Adding 6 pounds to my bag certainly made the climb harder and to top it all off, there were a few streams crossing the trail shortly after the high point. There wasn’t much in the way of views at the top and after following an ATV type track for a while through pine forest, I stopped and had some lunch.

Interesting sites along the ATV track:

From there it was downhill to a gravel road. The road was exposed but there was a good breeze so it wasn’t as hot as it could have been. I passed a campsite but opted to go to the next one less than a km further. It was still early but the trail goes up to a waterless ridge and I didn’t want to haul water to camp. When I got to my intended campsite, I realized there was no water there. So I had to backtrack to the previous one. There’s a river there, and I went for a swim and just relaxed until about 6 pm when I collected water and headed back up to the waterless campsite. I figured tomorrow is already a long day so it made sense even if it’s less than a km. The campground has a family staying here but we seem to be the only ones.

Today wasn’t the most scenic or interesting bit of this section, but there was one nice view from the end of the ATV track: