Day 7 - August 24: Hell Roaring Creek

Our day started with an optional hike to the tufa mounds.  For those of you who don't know, (aka, probably everyone) tufa mounds are made up of calcite that was dissolved by a hot spring, and then precipitated into a huge pile.  They were really cool.  They actually grow really fast, so you can pretty much watch fossil formation in action.

Kind of like this tree that's growing into a rock.  Rocks are pretty great (this is something I've learned from osmosis by spending so much time around Heather).

Caves are pretty cool too.  There are stalactites and stalagmites in caves!  You can watch them grow in this cave! (It would take a while, and I would probably get bored and wander off.  It would definitely be like watching paint dry, with much more visible results).

To get to the tufa mounds, we needed to walk past this lake (Emerald Lake, because it's green, and explorers are the most creative of all humans).

The tufa mounds are in a pretty remote and inaccessible corner of the park (it's probably not a corner, the park is gigantic and centers around the river, and we weren't THAT far from the river), and to finish our hike out there, we needed to take this pretty cool cable ferry.

The hike took pretty much all morning, and was closely followed by a 40 km paddle to Hell Roaring Creek.  Turns out Hell Roaring Creek is not a particularly roaring creek.  It was a very long day, but it was still a good day.  It decided that it would be cloudy, but it didn't rain until night time, thus ensuring that our tents would never be dry again.

See how roaring and hellish this creek isn't?

I came across this moose antler, and decided it was awesome, even though it's broken.  And being me, I decided I ought to be in a picture with it, just in case we never saw a real live moose (we did, but it was far away and mostly just looked like a brown blob on the side of the river).