Today would be the big day, the day we made it to the end (or the start, depending on your perspective). The mood was high as we embarked after our morning coffee ritual. The lead hikers with the slower pace headed out first followed probably about an hour later by the much older and less experienced marathon runners. If my memory serves, we met up for lunch before pushing on towards the end of the trail.
The drying of the rain flies was becoming a daily ritual. Not because of the rain, but because of the extreme temperature differences causing an extreme buildup of condensation on the interior of the rain fly. This cannot be under estimated, these things were soaked and some of us dried them out prior to hiking for the day and some of us dried them out once we got to our campsite.
Day 4 was an exceptional day. Not only did everything work out according to plan but our timing was so that it allowed us again another option. Reaching hideaway Lake by approximately 2 PM gave us the timing we needed to knock off the out and back to North Swallow River on this day rather than wait until the scheduled plan of doing it on day five. I’m going to now include a visual of some of the estimated timing for the sections of the trail. And this is why nobody would ever encourage us to do such a thing. However knowing what we had done up to this point combined with our Trail Education, Fitness and great weather we certainly did not feel it was a risk to push on and get another 8K in the books and to then began heading back tomorrow.
Once again these estimates are only a guide and there are no two groups of hikers that will have the same timing and outcomes on the trail. From hideaway to north swallow river which is only 4 km takes many people at least two hours. For some people it actually takes them a lot more than that, especially when you consider they may be starting the trail from North swallow with 45 pounds on their back, in poor weather and encroaching darkness. We forget this is a wilderness trail. It is not well travelled and not well
Marked.
We set up camp at Hideaway lake and basically walked the 4 km to North swallow and back with only water and a couple of celebratory treats. Once again a huge shout out to the park staff who kept the trail nice and clean, and to the good Lord for the great weather. It actually was a very doable hike at the end of the day to head out to North Swallow and back. I believe the entire trip segment only took us a couple of hours. We did it!
In 2019 my family did a trip across Canada and we bought the Parks Canada pass. Parks Canada did an excellent job marketing the share the chair program. It was really fun to get photos in the red chairs at all the different parks Canada locations from Ontario to British Columbia. We actually went through Pukaskwa that summer and I think we had some red chair photo sessions rate within the Hattie Cove campground.
This was also special. It’s really funny to think that after hiking for 3 1/2 days over almost 70 km and literally seeing about four people that we would pop out on the beach and see these red chairs. Signs of humanity. It was really fun to hang out in the red chairs having our celebratory treats and starting to wonder just how many nights would it take to get back?
Congratulations to Pierre, Nenad, KD and Duff for your excellent work and bad dad jokes traversing Canada‘s toughest trail in 3 1/2 days!
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