Upper valley excursion

The 5 of us set off in Bruce on Tuesday morning.

Setting off in Bruce. Photo courtesy of Rhiannon.

We got up to the end of the road about 9:45am and started walking...

Ready to hit the trail: Eric, Kristin, Rebecca, me and Will with Bruce in the background.

Nearly to Cottonwood Camp after about 4.5 hours of walking up the old road that has been washed out in a few places.

 We had been told that both Cottonwood Camp and Basin Creek Campsites were full and that we couldn't camp that far upvalley, so we got backcountry camping permits to camp at Park Creek for 1 night (knowing full well that we had no intention of camping there) and Cottonwood the next night.

Topographic map showing relevant locations of things. Don't know what the orange blob is - couldn't get rid of it!

 We got to Cottonwood Camp around 3pm and found no less than 6 campsites which were vacant. There was a group of about 8-10 guys who were camping here too, but they only took up 2 sites. It is SUCH a stupid booking system that the North Cascades National Park has in place... I can't even get started on that rant because it really makes me mad. Anyway, back to the story...

We found a couple of lovely sites to camp on and we all went fishing for a couple of hours before coming back to set up tents and cook dinner. It was a gorgeous evening with the crescent moon slipping behind Glory Mountain above Trapper Lake. We had a campfire and listened to some country music that Kristin and Eric had brought along to play on their ipod-player-thingy.

I had my own tent which I had borrowed from Bob, along with a sleeping pad, and it was so nice to have my own space and to sleep outside in the fresh mountain air.

I nearly forgot that we saw our first bear of the season when we went down to refill our water bottles in Flat Creek (just after passing Park Creek)! I had left my backpack on the main trail and just scampered down the little footpath to the creek, and I caught a glimpse of a full sized black bear who was grazing on some bugs inside a fallen tree. He was crouched over eating but stood up to look at me when I was about 100 feet away from him. I stopped in my tracks and backed slowly away back up the trail to tell the others.  We took pictures for a few minutes, then continued on our way to find another spot to refill our bottles!