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We woke up around 6am absolutely freezing!   Looking at the thermometer on my pack watch it was 32F inside the tent and that’s with two adults and a heat generating Jilly-dog.   After deciding it was pointless hoping that Lynn would bring me coffee in bed I got things going.   Jilly did well on her first night in the tent and demonstrated she was every bit Lynn’s equal in fighting for space on the sleeping pad (despite having her own nice doggie bed).   After our morning ritual we hit the trail around 8:40am with a goal of making it to Peeve Pass approximately 12 miles away.

The hiking today was pretty nice with wide open trails, meadows and lots small passes as the trail meandered up and over Three Fools Pass (would love to know where the name came from).    We passed a pack train coming out with one guy and four horses.   I’m always amazed to see the horses and mules loaded up with gear moving along with saws, boxes and lord knows what else strapped on.   Simply incredible.    After cresting Three Fools Pass we encountered our first “hunt camp” which was being used for a staging area for the upcoming High Hunt season which runs from September 15th for 10 days.  This is a time when you do not want to be out in the Pasayten as it’s swamped with hunters!

We continued climbing and ran into two women we’d just spent two lovely days at Corral Lake.  They’d been at higher elevation the previous night and had woken to 2 inches of snow.    The climb up Larch Pass was long and pretty strenuous though the trail was nicely maintained but quite steep in sections.   Upon reaching the summit of Larch Pass the views were lovely and the most open we’d seen so far on the trip.    From here it was only another mile to our planned camp at Corral Lake.   However the weather looked like it was changing with very dark clouds coming in.    We decided to push on and make camp at Peeve Pass about 4 miles further.    The map showed the trail to be almost level but this turned out to be a sign of things to come with an onward descent followed by another climb back to gain the elevation we’d lost.

We arrived into Peeve Pass around 6pm to find a lovely meadow with a great stream and water supply.    We pitched made camp under a large fir tree hoping to shield the worst of the coming rain.  Our planned route tomorrow would continue clockwise around Sheep Mountain but given the poor weather we decided to cut a day off the hike in the hope we could avoid a repeat of our soggy Scotland TGO Challenge Hike.