I pulled out my GPS and found out that we had not come nearly as far as we thought we had the night before, and that our hike for the day was going to be even longer than planned. We did find a small spring at the top of this peak and filled our water from it. This was probably not the best of things, but we were out of water and needed to drink. After filling up our water, we set out again.
After hiking along the ridge for a ways, we came to the one sign of recent human activity -- a tent. However, there were no people around. We would later find out that this tent belonged to a skitso guy who was out there who went missing. Since we were there they have started looking for his body. They found a journal at his site that was last dated on July 17th. Anyway, we thought that this was pretty freaky.
After hiking a bit farther, we came across our first major wildlife of the trip -- a Caribou.
The hike was pretty uneventful for a while. We just chugged along, fighting our way through ravines and chugging over the tundra. Eventually we headed back up to the ridge and followed that most of the way to our destination ... Spruce Lake ... our first source of non-toxic water. This worked great until it came time to get down from the ridge, which happenned to be surrounded by 10ft high thick brush. After fighting through this for about 30 minutes, we finally got to the river at the bottom, and eventually to our camp at Spruce Lake.
This completed about 13 miles of hiking...about 5 more miles than the suggested amount for tundra hiking.
We setup camp about 100 yards from the Spruce Lake, and had an amazing hot dinner. It was probably the best meal I have ever had. Freeze-dried Beef Stroganoff is soooo amazing after a long day of hiking. We also has tea and such. The mosquitos were a bit heavy, but we did not even care we were so tired and hungry.
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