EXOTERIC - Information Worth Sharing: ex·o·ter·ic
-adj
1. Not confined to an inner circle of disciples or initiates.
2. Comprehensible to or suited to the public; popular.
3. Of or relating to the outside; external.

This day started out with us heading back up to the rock climbing area. Clear skies had us soon getting our climbing gear on. There were two climbing lines set up on a very large rock face on the mountain. Hard and harder, take your pick.

The scouts had a good time and everyone made it up one or both of the lines. I decided to also give it a try and had no problem getting up the rock face. The rappeling back down was very fun. That was the first time for me.

We got back to the staff cabin, picked up our packs and headed to our next stop, Crater Lake. Crater Lake is a staffed camp and home to the Continental Tie and Lumber Co. The activity there was spar pole climbing and lumberjacking. We got there at 11:30am and were told that the next opportunity for spar pole climbing would be at 1pm. We sat down in the shade and ate our lunches. By noon, the skies were threatening. Thirty minutes later we were in a full scale thundershower and getting drenched. We ended up hanging out in one of the out buildings for about 2 hours waiting for the storm to quiet down. We were unable to do the spar pole climbing due to the rain.

Eventually the rain quieted down a bit and we decided to hit the trail to our camp for the night, Lower Bonito. We hiked up and over Fowler Pass and then got on the wrong trail. It turns out that we followed a bit of a short cut down to the meadow at Lower Bonito. It started off looking like a trail, but it just disappeared when it hit the meadow (which was full of cows and lots of cow pies). Our crew leader, Thomas, did some expert map reading and got everyone pointed in the right direction, even though my GPS was leading us in the opposite direction to what must have been an older waypoint for the campsite. The map was way more current than the waypoints in the GPS database. The GPS confirmed exactly where we were on the map.

We found a campsite and were just getting everything set up when the skies really opened up. We got totally soaked and the heavy rain lasted for several hours. The temperatures started dropping and we were lucky to get a roaring fire started. Once the fire was going we at least had some heat. A lot of our clothing was already wet from doing laundry at Miner's Park. My tent's rain fly was just saturated and I ended up getting a bit wet inside the tent. Drip, drip, drip all night inside the tent. Needless to say, I didn't sleep well.

This was probably our most challenging day yet, but we were able to manage to deal with the tremendous rain. This was our least favorite camp site on the whole trek. Cow pies everywhere, and everything got completely soaked and muddy from the rain. Everyone was looking forward to drying conditions in the night, but we ended up getting more heavy showers.

Photo album for the entire trip is here.