One more bear, a slight head wound and a general bruising...

We were greeted on our late night arrival at Lightning Lake campground (about 3 hours from home) by an amazingly clear starry night and the standard warnings about bears and cougars... but this time we heard an actual cougar yowling the night away. There were no middle of the night loo trips.


A suprisingly cold morning (the park gets so much snow in winter they trucked it from the car park to Vancouver for the Olympics) didn't deter us from gearing up for what turned out to be an eventful day of trail running.  Let's just say that from now on, I will give a VERY CLEAR warning to Mark if a branch is across the path.  Being, as you know, rather smaller, I ducked neatly out of the way, only for it to hit Mark full in the face, causing a long gash on his forehead.  Despite my first aid training, it was hard not to look a bit shocked.  After brief discussion, we decided stitches weren't needed, patched it with steri-strips and continued. 

Imagine a Harry Potter-esque forehead gash

Usual beautiful mountain views, lots of grouse, and regular shouting of 'hey bear' until about 2 minutes from the turnaround point, there was a very real black bear, munching on wildflowers in an alpine meadow about 200m ahead of us.  Awesome to see one in the true wilderness with no warning (and a good safe distance away).  We took a different route to get to the turnaround, but after 5 minutes of running in bear prints and seeing bear scat, decided to turn around... (No piccies I'm afraid in the name of safety!)

Unconcerned grouse

Great run down, until I took a bit of a tumble on a cunningly concealed rock.  Just some bruising to my right side, but necessitated walking the last 3km. Our first campfire (fairly successful without too much bickering) ended the day.