Day 14 - August 31: Prairie Creek

Luke and Dan celebrated our second layover day by sleeping in, so everyone else made breakfast.  The combination of sun and fog meant that there were some pretty cool spider webs around in the morning.

We went on a hike up Prairie Creek to see what we could see.  This was a most excellent hike because:
a) There were no mountains to climb, and
b) It wasn't raining.

Partway up the creek, there's a canyon.  The Nahanni moves so fast that it's hard to really enjoy the canyons as you paddle through, but this one stayed still for an extended period of time.

And it had caves in it!

You can't really see the caves, Heather didn't manage to get a good picture of those.

The rest of our day mostly consisted of Heather reading her book and working her way through her Sudoku book (Heather did so many Sudoku on the river that she's more or less permanently sworn off them).  Prairie Creek had a pretty good view of the plateau across the river.

Day 13 - August 30: Prairie Creek

For the third day in a row, it was sunny!  Which was awesome, because we had a lot of paddling to do, and it was much more pleasant without the threat of raining hanging about.  

This stack of rocks is known as the Library.  Gord declared that Jim should go into the cave for a picture.  

Also!  We saw a bear!  It was a very stupid bear, mind you.  It decided it wanted to climb a cliff.  Needless to say, bears are really lousy climbers (penguins aren't much better, but we're also slightly smarter, so we wouldn't have tried to climb the cliff in the first place).  This particular bear spent the entire time it was in sight trying to climb the cliff.  It even fell into the river a couple of times, it was ridiculous.

We paddled through Second Canyon, which wasn't as dramatic as Third Canyon, but still pretty impressive.  It had some pretty interesting shapes going on at the tops of the cliffs.

Not to mention some pretty fantastic alluvial fans.  

Apparently Prairie Creek didn't have any firewood, so we stopped on the side of the river before we got there and we all picked up canoes full of wood.  It looked VERY ridiculous watching all the canoes on the river with super long sticks sticking out on both sides.

When we got to our site that night, we were informed that we would be having a surprise layover day.  Also, that night we asked Luke and Dan what the rest of our trip would look like, and it turned out that they forgot that there are 31 days in August.  Meaning that we were actually in way less of a hurry than we thought.