Killarney Day 5 - Wednesday Aug 12/09

Josh was up at 6am this morning. Lucky for the rest of us that his wake up call didn't come until 6:40! Woo! Yay for sleeping in.

It took us until NINE AM to get on the trail! Sl...o.....w.... stiff morning. Bonus though, we got to see the sun come up over the trees across the lake. Its a chilly morning, but once that sun gets up, it promises to be a scorcher.

The goal for the day is to hike about 8km to our next site as quickly as possible so that we can enjoy our next site during the beautiful afternoon hours (we also have a lot of wet laundry to dry!).

Turned out to be a pretty slow moving day though. We're right in the middle of the 'Hensen Township' section of trail. I'm pretty sure I read somewhere that its the roughest section of trail out here. Definitely proving to be true! Lots of ups & downs, some pretty spectacular views, and some pretty rugged climbs. The fear of heights thing has slowed us down a bit, but not nearly as much as yesterday; Deanne's dealing with it the best she can.

Got lots of pictures today; lots and lots! Even used someone's fancy SLR to take a group shot of a bunch of hikers moving in the opposite direction.

Josh tripped on practically nothing around noon and gave his ankle a good twist, so we stopped for lunch and Heather wrapped it for him. Its our first (and hopefully only) major injury thus far. Heather's knees bother her, I've got one that hurts once in awhile, and so does Deanne; blisters are to be expected and I had one pop on me at some point, but that's pretty much it. My toes have really been bothering me but I've realized that the one which actually aches long after we've stopped hiking for the day is the one I broke at youth group years ago (backyard soccer: toe meet tree stump.)

Anyway, we poked along with our sore joints and blisters and muscles across huge fields of rolling rock, through wooded areas, even across a pretty impressive beaver dam. We basically walked over the top, and down the other side, of two mountains today. Climbing Silver Peak tomorrow should be interesting! (Deanne says she's sitting in a tent at the bottom of the trail and waiting for us there!) Still not sure how we're gonna climb 2km to the peak, 2km back, and then another 10km to our site! It might be a painful day!

We got to our site (H34 on David Lake) at about 3pm. It's a big lake and popular with canoers. There was a group just leaving the site as we got there. It's a nice site - in the woods but with a nice big slab of rock for a beach. This lake is of the crystal clear variety too, but with a nice shallow wading area; no deep drop offs here.


Had a little shaving party on the beach, did a little laundry, got it all hung up (maybe it'll dry for a change). I've been sitting on the beach journaling and enjoying the scenery. It's to bad its an east facing beach with no direct afternoon sun.

Having some classy KD for dinner tonight - looking forward to that! Deanne mentioned pizza earlier... that'd be good too but I don't think anyone would deliver, considering we don't even have any cellphone reception out here. There are times when I'm hiking, especially walking up a trail through woodsy areas, I often find myself expecting to walk out into a farmer's field. That happens all the time on the Bruce trail, but not here! Nor do we have to walk on any roads. I like it!

Bedtime... 9:20pm. Boy, we party hard!

Killarney Day 4 - Tuesday Aug 11/09

7:30am wake up this morning with oatmeal for breakfast. Sort of a chilly morning but nice clear skies promise a beautiful day ahead.

On the trail by 9, we made pretty good time for awhile. But then things started to get interesting. A lot of ups & downs, climbing over rocks and things. It made for quite the adventure! (and hopefully a few good pictures too!)

Ups & downs hurt though. Ups are just plain hard and I find myself sweating like a maniac and out of breath with my heart pounding out of my chest in no time at all. Downhills, well, they hurt too. Toes jammed down to the front of boots, achy knees. The up pains are different than the down pains, but it's just as difficult. But Man! Do I feel ALIVE! My knees hurt, my feet & toes hurt, my shoulders hurt... lol

Anyway... We stopped for lunch at some site along the way. Cheese & crackers; the usual. NOT impressed with water access here. First off, it was down a cliff. Then, when we got to the bottom, the only shore access was right beside a beaver lodge. Not cool. I trust our water filter, but I also am not interested in getting beaver fever half way through an 8 day trip! Heather & I decided to just get enough water to get us to a nearby stream.

Things in the afternoon got interesting. We had to climb a pretty huge incline - the highest we've been so far. It was AMAZING!! The views we saw were spectacular! We got a sense today that we're actually in the middle of a mountain range.

Unfortunately, Deanne took one look out over the view that the rest of us thought was amazing, and realized an incredibly real and intense fear of heights! Vertigo, wobbly knees, the whole bit. It took some convincing to get her talked through that open bit of trail along the edge and back into the bush. Standing on the edge of a mountain really isn't the most ideal place to find out you're horribly afraid of open heights!

The last part of the hike was long and slow. I hurt. I think we all hurt. But, we pressed on and got to our site around 6pm. H32. Its a bit of a long walk into the site because you have to walk around the end of Lake Skiguag. But, its a pretty nice spot. The lake is a dead lake just like Acid Lake, so it's turquois blue and clear to the bottom. Tents and fire pit are up on the rocks - lots of big slabs here; the rocks stair-step themselves down to the water with the last few steps being 4 or 5 inches underwater. Great for getting cleaned up, doing laundry, dishes, swimming, for just standing in (after a long day shoved in a pair of boots, the ol' feet like to soak in some cool water). Watch out for that last step though! It looks like it's about 15ft of crystal clear water straight down! I can't help but think that my brother's fiance would probably love to scuba dive here! We cleaned up, set things up, went for a quick dip to get clean (it was cold; but we had also missed the sunshine), did some laundry...

We had a rice dinner at like 8pm. Made some pretty tasty bannock after that and then it was a pretty quick cleanup of the campsite after that because it was getting late and we were losing light. There was also a mouse scurrying around this site, so we had to get our food bag hung up before anything disappeared on us.

We're sitting around a fire right now, but we'll likely be in bed by 10:30.

I hope I hurt less tomorrow!

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!

No... I have not fallen off the face of the planet. I've just been busy.
One of these days, (maybe later this week if you're lucky), I'll continue my Killarney adventures so that you can live vicariously through me.
But not today.