No bear sightings :( and our stuff hung in the trees wasn't touched, so warm the clothes in the sleeping bag and start packing up. My buddy and I seem to have a good routine and making things work without words.
Headed out and had some bits of road, bits of soft underfoot forest and challenges with rocks. Some forest sections and some escarpment sections and bluffs. On full packs again today and I must simply be getting the hang of traversing this stuff more easily.
They call a lot of the escarpment alvars, which they say is dolomite limestone with little soil - this translates to lots of rock with lots of tree roots out of the ground, lots of holes and lots of crevices to traverse. I did my mini freak on the first day with an 1/2m crevasse and now just cross them. Most not that large but just heaps of them. Sometimes I'm even managing to get a walking rhythm over all of this terrain. Starting to enjoy all the bits and bobs and around every turn, looking for what the next lot of terrain is.
We had an interesting section of something totally different after the first bluff today. Looks like an old orchard, but the trees don't look that old. Defo none of them fruiting. So we traversed a paddock and got to experience some beautiful orb webs full of dew in the early morning sun before we went back into the forest and our first climb which looked steep on the map, but again they provided some steep stairs in the toughest bit.
Heard the woodpecker early rattling the trees and a few squirrels in the trees but not much else in the fauna department today but did catch a beautiful orange butterfly I nearly stood on and then she closed her wings and wouldn't reopen them. Little less vision of the coast today and the escarpment is much further back from the shoreline. There is a lot of flat ground between the lake and the cliffs now and offered us some beautiful over edge sights of forest and mossy edges and rocks. The trail still runs on the very edge of the cliff and it is beautiful to be so close, just need to be careful.<