August 30

Saturday morning we woke up on a mission; it was to be the only sunny day according to predictions for the entire trip, and so we were looking forward to it, as well as getting in a much sight-seeing and other activities as possible. After breakfast burritos, a luxury compared to some of the things we eat on our backpacking trips, we drove the the Apgar Transit Center where we were going to pick up a shuttle. Well it filled up since only 12 people can go on at a time, and so we didn't make it on, but the volunteers said that if we took the next bus half way up we could catch another shuttle to the top, and that would be faster than waiting for the next shuttle that would go all the way up. So that's what we did.

But when we got to the middle place we realized that almost all of the shuttles would be full since we were in the middle of the mountain. We finally got one, and by the time we reached the top at Logan's Pass, it had taken up an hour and a half of our time. We started our right away at a pretty fast pace on the the Hidden Lakes hike. Most people merely went to the lookout, so once we passed them about a mile and a half in we didn't see that many people. We had a really fun lunch at the lake where we skipped rocks and snacked for a while.

We ran into a couple of young Canadian women we'd met on the shuttle at the lake, who were really nice. Mom gave them some of her blister treatment pack because one of the had really bad blisters on both of her feet that looked really painful. When we got back to the head of the trail we still had about four hours before the last shuttle left, so we decided we'd ride down the east side of the pass just to side-see a little bit. Well that took about two hours, and then we came back and went to the Visitors Center at the top of the Pass to kill some time.

The last shuttle was supposed to leave at seven o'clock, and we went to line up to catch one at 5:30, thinking we had plenty of time. Well it turns out the whole shuttle schedule was messed up, and there was an uncharacteristically large number of people wanting to catch a shuttle, and so we all had to put our names on lists. Because many shuttles went down with only ten people, only two to three families went at a time, so we didn't even leave the top of the pass until 7:15. There was still a good four shuttle loads of people waiting to catch a shuttle down.

When we got back to the campsite we had a fire and ate some dinner, and then went into the tent pretty early. Every campsite in the campground was full, and so there was a lot of people still up talking and eating etc, so I just read for a while. I didn't sleep very well that night for some reason, but it was still a very full a satesfying day, despite shuttle mishaps.