Day 9 was a TREAT!

Today we woke up to a dry morning after surviving a wet night.  Leaving Christina Lake you start your initial climb up the Paulson pass. With a nice wide shoulder the initial start to your day isn’t too hard.  There is tons of wildlife through this pass, except we still hadn’t seen any mountain goats. We saw a black bear on one of our roadside stops but we quickly realized it was a baby black bear. Kelly got out of there like a bat out of hell and we quickly followed suit. Midway through the morning after contemplating hitch hiking several times, travelling up roads with no shoulders and lots of gravel, we finally reached the top at 1535 meters. After a quick victory dance and summit-selfies we packed on the layers, as there was still snow on the ground at the side of the road at the top, and started our decent. We could see the thunder clouds in the distance during our ascent and they’d finally started to pour by the time we were heading down. While everybody was suiting up in rain gear the park warden was nice enough to let us know that there were grizzly bears in the area. At this point it had begun to torrential downpour painful, buckets of hail. Between the grizzly infested forest and the horrible weather we made it down the mountain at about 50 km/h into Castlegar and found the first hotel with a hot tub. Later Danica let us know that not only had the park warden mentioned the grizzlies but that one had, just last year, chased him down on the very stretch of highway we were about to decent. After a long, miserable day it was really nice to relax in the hot tub and have a nice dinner out at Boston Pizza.