North Rim - Day 4

Snug Harbour to Western Brook Pond trailhead

September 8, 2017

What a night! Unrelenting rain, torrential at times, mixed with wind gusts that threatened to blow our tent (complete with us inside of it) away to Never, Neverland. Fortunately our tent held both strong and dry. Sleep through all of this though, was very fleeting, and at 07:00 a short break in the rain had me up out of the tent making coffee. I sat down at the red chairs with my breakfast and watched the wind blowing the waves up onto the beach and a waterfall across the bay that would go from falling in the normal vertical position, to blown sideways in a horizontal fashion, and even completely upwards back from whence it came in some of the stronger gusts. The rain started pouring again, but since I was comfortably seated with the best view in the house, I just zipped deeper into my rain jacket and enjoyed my breakfast anyway. Kat got up an hour later and as we packed camp the rain stopped again, this time for good. We said goodbye to Ian and company, and then hit the trail. The Snug Harbour trail is an absolutely awful mess of mud, putting most Adirondack trails to shame. The only relief was a few long stretches of pebble beach which were very pretty and a pleasure to walk along. There was one small river crossing near the beginning of the day for which we had to de-boot and wade through the knee deep water. At the end, after a couple of hours of slurping along the muddy trail, we reached the outlet of the Western Brook Pond. Here was a true ford which reached high thigh on me, and well over the waist on Katharina. Fortunately the current was mild, so I crossed back to carry Katharina's pack to keep it above the water. From here it was an easy walk down the well maintained boat tour trail, and in short order we were back at the trailhead. Here we met a large group who were heading in, which we exchanged portrait services; them clean, us dirty. We gave them quite a bit of beta and then headed off into Rocky Harbour for a well earned post hike meal.

One of the nice moments of hiking along the beach instead of the bog.

Fording the first river.

Fording the second river in me skivvies.

Muddy folk at the end of the hike.

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