Day 6: Friday, August 18th
We were moving from HOL to FRA today, so knowing we had a very easy day we were not the first group to be up and about. Too bad, as one of the other groups reportedly saw a grizzly sow and cub coming down the slopes into the Hole in the Wall cirque. But again, by the time we were up, it was nowhere to be found. We weren't too late, however, to enjoy breakfast with everyone - including the couple I had lent my spare stove to. While we continued chatting over breakfast, they asked if we had brought any fishing equipment, to which we answered yes. They then proceeded to tell us how great the fishing at Francis had been the day before. This got us both excited as, while not avid fisherman, we really do enjoy it and had both packed in spinning rods and a few spinners and spoons.
We took our time at breakfast before packing up camp and then headed on towards Francis. As we hiked out of the cirque, we took several short breaks to enjoy the views and watch for the bears that had been seen earlier that morning. But again, no luck on bear sightings. About the time we met up with the main trail and headed around the bend towards the section with the cliffs, we passed our first of a several groups of hikers. They had all heard of the bears near HOL, but we had to say we hadn't seen any. Several of them again mentioned the fishing after seeing the pole strapped to my pack. I have to say, the hike from HOL over to the Brown Pass junction was really beautiful too. We did find a large patch of huckleberries that hadn't really been touched, so we were moving pretty slowly as we ate berries by the handful. At one point, I was trying to reach a ways off the trail to get to a particularly loaded busch and, as I stood back up, the line on my fishing pole (which was lashed to the side of my pack) got tangled on a dried out stalk of beargrass. It pulled taught before snapping back and hitting me, which really surprised me for a minute and nearly caused me to fall down. But after cleaning up the broken line, we continued along, eating more berries.
Somewhere along the trail we sighted a rather large patch of beargrass that was still in bloom. As we literally had not seen more than one or two stalks in bloom near each other the entire trip, I was excited for my dad to get his glimpse of it. Thinking back, I still can't believe how many beargrass stalks we saw while hiking - just none of it was in bloom. I'm sure people who were fortunate enough to hike there earlier in the year were treated to some beautiful views. We finally reached the beargrass and took the time to take some photos and eat some more berries.
Almost immediately after taking this last photo, we ran into our first trouble of the season. Dad had just started hiking along and was still working on the straps of his poles when his toe caught a rock sticking out from the edge of the trail. Without the poles to catch himself (and really just getting caught in the beargrass to prevent him from catching his balance more quickly), he took a pretty big tumble, hitting a few rocks as he rolled over. After landing pretty awkwardly on his hip, we were careful getting back up and took the pack off for a few minutes. His hip was bruised pretty well, but after stretching it out a bit, we loaded back up and started hiking. But heading downhill with the pack and the bruised hip was causing a bit of pain and we had a lot more downhill to do as we were getting really close to the trail junction. In general, I think downhill was the most problematic for him anyways. He had an ACL tear back in the early 90s (before the advent of arthroscopic surgery) which, combined with being 66, leads to it being difficult to really extend his leg too far. So going downhill meant a lot of short steps and a slow hike.
But we continued down the switchbacks, again eating a ton of berries as we went. With all of the berries, I really expected that there must be bears all over the place. But we didn't so much as see any scat. Eventually we reached Thunderbird pond and stopped to have some lunch. We'd carried in a block of cheddar which was not only getting heavy, but was also reaching its end of life, so we ate some cheese and crackers as a late morning snack. There was another solo hiker eating lunch there as well and we talked for a good 45 minutes while enjoying the sun and food. By the time we got started again, Dad was back to feeling pretty good and his hip stopped bothering him. So we hiked the rest of the way from the pond down to Francis at a pretty good clip. I'm not sure what I expected for this section of trail, but there wasn't a lot of great views and the trail was quite overgrown in places. We ended up getting into Francis around 1:00pm. I had heard great things about Francis and, of all the camps we had on our itinerary, it was the one I was most looking forward to. The news about the fishing certainly helped too.
We went straight to the food prep area to hang our food and make some Gatorade. While there, we met two young men who were on a quest to knock off all six 10 thousand footers in one backcountry trip. Paul and Tim have already mentioned them, but they were truly a humble group. They had just climbed Kintla (with two undesignated sites) and were on their way to Kootenai. We talked for a while and I found they would be in the Many Glacier backcountry site (after hitting Cleveland and Merritt) the day we were hiking out and the night Tim and Laura would be there, so I mentioned they should try to introduce themselves as I knew Tim would love to hear about their trip. After finishing off a Gatorade, I decided I really wanted to do some fishing, so we walked down and snagged one of the site and started setting up camp. While getting my fishing gear set up, I quickly noticed that I was somehow missing my reel. It had fallen off my rod and pack sometime between when my line had snagged and we'd gotten into our site. Really bummed, I walked back up to the food prep area to see if there was any chance it had fallen off there. Unfortunately, it hadn't. But the two climbers got really excited and said they had found it on the trail at the top of the switchbacks near the Brown Pass trail junction.
I was pretty dejected, but then karma struck again as the campers I had lent my stove to walked into the food prep area for lunch. They had hiked down to Francis that morning (well in front of us) and had been fishing and swimming for a while. They had a couple of trout they had cleaned and packed away in some cold water and were going to grab a quick lunch before trying to make the afternoon boat to Waterton. As they had decided they were going to bail on their last night (Janet), they returned the stove and then - in an extraordinary act of kindness - offered to let me borrow his fishing pole. He said, no worries, I'll email you my address when I get home and I have no doubt you'll mail it back. More proof to me that the people who backpack really do share a special bond.
So after talking and laughing about it for a while, we said our farewells and they headed home and we headed down to do some fishing. Luckily for me, everyone who had mentioned the fishing was dead on. We cleaned up for the first hour or so, catching as many small rainbows (8-10") by the inlet as we cared. We eventually decided to take a bit of a bath and do some laundry. After nearly getting hypothermia in the water, we laid our clothes out to dry with some rocks and then started picking our way along the shore around towards the waterfall. As we made our way along, the water got deeper and deeper and we started catching bigger and bigger trout. I don't know much about identifying trout, but we started getting ones that more brownish than silver (like we were getting at the inlet) and in the 10-12" range. We got a couple in the 12-14" range and I got one that was close to 16". So for us, who are not big fisherman, it was a lot of fun. All in all, we ended up with somewhere around 30 we took off hooks and another 15-20 that we would let shake themselves off just off shore.
(with my borrowed fishing pole)
Unfortunately, we didn't get any pictures of the bigger ones as we had our second accident of the day. As we were working towards the waterfall, there were a couple of places we had to walk through the water as the shoreline was too steep. At one of those places, Dad stepped on a particularly slippery rock and again took a big fall. He had a couple of scrapes and bruises on his leg where he hit a rock, but was up pretty quickly. Unfortunately, he had my camera in his pocket. So after we made sure he was ok, I popped the battery out of the camera and that was the end of pictures for a while. The wind also started to really pick up around this time and the fishing just dropped off a cliff. We watched these crazy downdrafts for a while where a big wind burst would come straight down and hit the lake and waves would get pushed out in EVERY direction. Later that evening, I did try turning the camera on again and for the most part, it was working. The display on the back was a little flaky and it was doing some off things with the auto focus, but it was working again.
That night we had a good dinner by ourselves. There was another group that took the other site, but they were very private and ate early and went to bed even earlier. After dinner, we caught a few more fish before retiring to our site to try to repair one of our Mayfly chairs. I have to say - I have a PhD in mechanical engineering and the MacGuyver-ing we did to fix that chair was perhaps the most complex feat of engineering I've ever accomplished. I'd go into more detail, but it would pretty hard to describe. Suffice to say, we went to bed pretty proud.
FWIW - if anyone picked up an Abu Garcia Cardinal S10 spinning real near Brown Pass, I would love to have it back!