Sparwood, Canada - Polarsteps

Most of this day was so good-- we biked the 30km from Fernie to Sparwood and spent the afternoon with Kini's high school friend, Angie, at Sparwood's landmark giant truck. The roads hadn't been flooded out, but there were still flood warnings and rain/thunderstorm forecasts in the area, so in the late afternoon we still made the choice to climb up into the Crowsnest Pass to get to higher ground. Late in the day is a rough time to start climbing a mountain summit, and this led into a pretty terrible evening and night. Still tired from the long previous day, climbing in the evening with trucks going past us, we were about 6km from our campground goal and 2km from the Alberta border when the sky darkened and opened up on us and the thunder and lightning started. We ended up pulling onto a forestry road behind a truck weight scale and setting up the tent under some trees in torrents of rain. We ate cookies for dinner and wrapped all our food bags tightly in a tarp a little ways from the tent (our lazy option when we don't have the time, energy, or solid reachable branches to hang them away from bears). And then stayed awake most of the night feeling uneasy, watching the lightning flashes, and imagining all kinds of other sounds in the sound of the rain on the tent. At one point there was an animal sound that might have been a bird or might have been a cougar, and we ended up sounding the airhorn we keep in the tent (there had also been some pawprints at the entrance to the forestry road that I'd read as 'people walk their dogs here', but a couple of days later we were looking at a park pamphlet about cougars and I realized I was probably wrong about that). -Sara