Killarney Day 3 - Monday August 10

"Today is Monday, right?" "All day."

Made it to bed at 9:50 last night - the bugs were just too bad to sit out in them.

Much better sleep had by all last night with wake up around 8am. We're still having trouble getting packed up & motivated to go a t a decent time, but, after a group picture at our site, we hit the trail at 10am.

Pretty decent trail today. Only going 8km and it's all pretty flat. Actually, we're going around the edge of a 'great bog' today (although, there were a few big climbs during the day).

We motored for the first hour, made great time and started to hope we'd make it to our site by early afternoon. We definitely slowed down after that first break though and stopped pretty frequently for awhile. I led the pack most of the day. Not sure why they let me do that (I'm kinda slow) but no one seemed to mind. We stopped at site H18 in hopes of water - today's been a pretty warm day and we've even seen our fair share of sunshine.

H18 itself has a gorgeous view of Three Narrows Lake BUT... About a 20ft drop to the water. Not an easy task to get water. Josh is determined though and managed to climb down to fill 3 or 4 bottles. By the time he was finished, it was pretty much lunchtime so we pulled out the cheese & crackers. Spent quite awhile at H18. Turns out it was a good thing - we found a blueberry patch and managed to fill an entire water bottle full for later.

Kept on plodding along. Had some pretty steep inclines & drops at times. And at one point we had to walk through this swampy lake/beaver pond, across this narrow dirt path with water on each side then, just for fun, across a pile of logs. I accidently jammed my trekking pole between the logs and it went down about 2ft with no sign of stopping. I'm sure that one wrong move off the logs would have meant a dip in muddy, disgusting water over your head!

Somewhere along the way, I found a pen laying on the trail. Good find actually, I was worried my mechanical pencil might not last the entire trip.

It was 3:30 when we got to our site - H20. Strange little site on a tiny little lake just off of Three Narrows. The site is up on top of a rock, with the fire right out in the open on a point with a good 15ft drop to the lake. It'd probably be a good cliff jumping spot if you weren't chicken.

I am chicken however. I took one look at the water (you can walk down to the edge on a couple slippery rocks that descend into the black depths like water slides. One look at that and there was no way I was jumping in! It didn't help that there was a catfish swimming around. Josh & Deanne went in though; seemed to like it, didn't die anyway. Heather & I used a pot on the shore to wash up in (and shave). It did feel good to get rid of the bush woman feel (let me know if I'm sharing too much information!).

The rest of the site sucks. No decent place to set up tents without rocks, tree roots, or terrible slants. And, the washroom box doesn't open for privacy's sake, no, its up on a hill with a full view looking over the entire camp site! Yay! :S

Couscous for dinner after Josh finally managed to get a good fire going (all the wood was wet). Odd stuff couscous is, but it did the job. Then all the ingredients for a berry crisp were put in the pot with the blueberries we had picked earlier. The lack of oven to bake it in meant that it turned out somewhat like blueberry pie filling - pretty tasty stuff really!

Time to get the camp cleaned up. 8:30pm - its almost dark and the bugs are coming out again. Probably early to bed again and then we really do have to get up at a decent time. 12km or something to hike tomorrow.


Ended the night with a nice long campfire, star gazing, watching some shooting stars, sheet (heat?) lightening, and a bright orange moon rising over the lake.

Of course... We also somehow ended up talking about lions & tigers & bears (oh my!) and other big animals which might kill us in our sleep.

Night!