Thursday,

Not sure many of us slept well through this first night, with the thunder, lightening, and rain throughout the night.

Waking up early (6am) for some leaders and shortly after for most Scouts……we had told them they could sleep in till 7am, but with movement inside the campsite most woke up early as well.  It had stopped raining but everything was soaking wet.  It had rained real hard and our campsite was in a low spot.  Most tents had water puddles sitting underneath their tents, including mine in the morning. 

Tear down went smoothly but all tent had to be packed up wet…..lets just hope it’s not raining at our next destination and we can dry out everything a bit before we have to sleep in them for this night. Once fed and all packed up we were on the road again.

We had made a slight adjustment to the agenda; we had decided that we would go to the hot springs today on our way up instead of on the second last day on our way down. This day had no planned activities, except for traveling and setting up camp so we Leader thought the adjustment made sense.  On the road going up to the hot springs we saw the first of many wildlife sightings, six mountain goats on the road up and 4 to 5 in the parking lot & the grounds around the hot springs.  Wow, they were close!!!!

All the kids love going into the cold pool (can’t remember how cold it was, my Scout dared me to go into it and I can tell you it was REALLY COLD) then they would hurry to get back into the hot pool……was amusing watching them do this, they needed to burn off some energy after being in the vehicles for two days.

Once all out of the pool, we were on our way down to our next destination home base camp for 3 nights 2 days.  We did see more wildlife on our way down from the hot springs first of many bears that we saw, this one was a black bear eating his supper on the side of the road, not a care in the work that we had stop and took picture from the inside of our vehicles. 

Camp took a bit longer to set up today due to everything being wet and the many rocks under the ground that pegs had to work around and be repositioned.  We wanted to make sure that tents were dry before everyone put there stuff into them. We also had a few other things to set up due to not moving out of this site for a few days.  Bathing suit need to be dried so cloths lines so they were put up, a kitchen area was set up with a roof, picnic table need to be moved around, fire wood needed to be collected and chopped.  Once that was complete we started making dinner.  This even we managed to sit around the fire pit for a bit and realised it was late and we had a very busy day ahead of us so we all went to bed.