Date: September 2, 2018
Length: 15.2 km
Elevation: 450 m
Time: 7 hours 36 minutes
The second last day of hour hike was easily the longest, mentally if not actually. Since our travel plans had been to push hard on days one and two and then take it easy on days 3 and 4 we got off to a late start. It was a bit before 10 am when we hit the trail, breakfast already eaten and muscles pretty sore from the previous two days. We took some time before we got going to limber up a bit but it didn't matter, we were in for a long day of leg and foot soreness.
As we started out from the Mantario lake camp site, we were treated to a nice view form the ridge line down on the north west end of the lake. Much of the distance between Moosehead lake (from day 2) and Ritchie lake (still ahead) is on a ridge line looking out over the surrounding area. We were also treated to some leaves turned orange, yellow, and brown, a solid reminder that it gets cold at night and fall was appraoching.
We stopped at Ritchie lake around 1 pm roughly for lunch, a foot soak, and to filter more water for the rest of the trip to Hemenway lake. The side trip added about 800m of distance to the day, but the toilet and picnic table were more than worth it. We spent about an hour stretching, soaking our feet and eating lunch. Roslyn had decided that we were going to have soy nut butter with wraps for lunch. As you can see from the face she's making below it wasn't the greatest of choices (she actually didn't finish lunch!).
After lunch, it probably took us another hour for our legs to loosen up again, and our feet were getting progressively more sore. It was part of the hike that was a bit more of a grind than an enjoyment at the time, but looking back on it it was still pretty great. We even managed to shake our funk off for a bit to score some great pictures.
By the time we arrive at the camp site a bit after 5 pm, we had already moved past grumpy and back into a 'well everything hurts so lets try to be happy' kind of mood. There were probably 20-30 people at Hemenway already, many of whom had come out for a weekend trip from the north trail head. We had a few short conversations as we looked around for a campsite and privy, and it was nice to hear everyone telling us that the 10 km from Hemenway to the trail head was flat and easy going.
After a bit of searching, we managed to find a pretty awesome campsite set back from where everyone else was in a little glade. All the other flat spots were solid bed rock so it was nice to find a soft spot to sleep on.
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