Day 3: We woke up early to eat some breakfast, break camp, and pack up our gear. We needed to go through Customs via the ROAM app, which we had never tried before, before we got on the boat to Goat Haunt, so we wanted to give ourselves plenty of time. Unfortunately, while breaking camp and packing things up, I realized I had somehow lost my headlamp. I tried replacing my steps from the night before - which meant a walk down to Waterton lake, a trip to the bathroom/showers, and a loop around the campground. No dice. Eventually, I resigned myself to buying a new one before we left Waterton. But then as I took my hat off to change my shirt, I found it on my hat. We had all four of us looking for it, and no one bothered to notice it was on my head the entire time.
So we had purchased tickets for the 10am boat ride and been told to arrive at 9:30 to complete the Customs check-in via the iPads on the boat dock. Luckily, we arrived by 9:15 after parking our car along the road (under a streetlight - it had been suggested to park under a light along the road to prevent breakins? is there a big crime problem in Wateron?) and carrying our packs over to the dock. When we got to the iPads, there was already quite a line. Apparently they had forgotten to charge the iPads, so only one was working, and it wasn't working well. We pulled out our cell phones and tried to download the app, set up our trip, and connect to Customs, but the app was having trouble. We manged to burn through almost 20% of our cell battery in just about 30 minutes before we finally got a turn at the iPad and finally got cleared. As I was planning on using my phone as a camera for the entire trip, I ran back to the car and tried to charge it up for a couple of minutes (got about 5% back) before booking it back to the boat. As we were on the dock waiting to load, I pulled my ticket out just in time for a gust of wind to blow it out of my hand. It then, amazingly, fell right between two boards on the dock and dropped down underneath. I jumped over the railing and went under the dock and luckily found it dry and on shore. Finally we got on the boat and were on our way.
The smoke was much worse this morning than it had been the previous day. For the first half of the trip, while hugging the western shore, we could barely even see the other side of the lake. There was no wildlife along the way, but we had a fun time. We got to Waterton and on the trail sometime around 11:30am. We spoke with a few hikers who warned us of mosquitoes near Waterton River Campground, but we were still no where near prepared. We had to drop packs, break out the spray, and douse ourselves to stop the feeding frenzy. I think, amazingly, this was the last mosquito on the entire trip.
Our first night was at Hawksbill, so we had plenty of time to get there. So we took our time and stopped at Lake Janet for a while. The water was much higher than I remembered last year. We ate lunch at the western/inlet end of the lake right by the trail. At the inlet the previous year, there had been several braided streams flowing in through a muddy area - but this time it was all under water. Unfortunately, due to the smoke, we couldn't even make out the ridgeline of the Citadel Peaks or Porcupine Ridge. You couldn't taste or smell the smoke in the Olson Creek valley, but it sure made everything hazy a few thousand feet up.
Just after Janet, we ran into a group of hikers we recognized! Two good friends of mine (one of whom works in my office in Houston, TX and the other works in our NYC office) had started 4 days earlier and were headed the other direction. They had started with a FRA-BRO-BOU-HOL-HAW permit, but had modified it FRA-BRO-BOU-HOL-WAT-GLF-MOL-FIF-GRN-MAN-GUN-REY-MAN-ELF. If it sounds crazy to you, don't worry. It also sounds crazy to me. But, this guy had literally walked across the entire continent of Australia on a summer break from college. So it probably didn't sound so intimidating to him. It turned out that they had to make a few adjustments half way through the trip due to the fires, but he had a great trip.
Before we split, we grabbed a group picture.
After that, it was on to Hawksbill. When we got there, we grabbed a site and set up our tents. Then my buddy and I grabbed our fishing hear and backtracked down to Francis while our dads relaxed in camp for a while. The views at Francis were seriously impacted by the haze, but fishing started out great, I caught a trout on my first and third casts before my buddy's reel starting having some issues. We took a few minutes trying to fix it before giving up and heading back to camp for dinner.
Back at camp, we had a great dinner of our dehydrated meals while trying to figure out where the heck the hawksbill was. We thought we could make a vulture head, but no hakwsbill was seen. If you've got a photo of the hawkbill and can explain it, I'd love to see it. About the time we finished up dinner, another group came in that had a permit for Brown Pass. They said the smoke was pretty bad up there, the bugs were terrible, the pit toilet was filling up, and the water had dried out. They said a ranger had told them they could try to grab a spot at Hawksbill if there was an opening, or they could set up camp at the hitching post. They hung our around the food prep area with us for a while (even through the other site was empty) waiting to see if anyone else would come. When it was starting to get dark, they decided to set up camp in the other site. We knew that the second site was originally booked by our friends (we were planning on meeting up, but they wanted to shorten their next day), so there was a good chance it was open. Interestingly, we both had permits for this night but there were only two sites? I thought they held half for walkups?
At any rate, we decided to sleep without the flys on the tent that night. It was encouraging to see the stars coming out one by one as it got darker until we could see the milky way through the tent wall. I had packed in my DSLR and a tripod hoping to take some mikly way photos, so I was glad to see it clear up and it gave us some hope that the smoke would clear in the morning.