He looked healthy though, and we had to kind of shoo him out of camp. However, when we got in bed I could hear him clomping around our camp. We were both glad we had gotten the twine to hang a bear bag though it worked for a goat and not from bears.
At about 3:30am I was awakened by a headlamp and by someone asking, “Is anyone home?” I yelled, “Yes!” and then asked, “What is going on?” He told me they were looking for someone’s tent and at this point, Dom woke up and said, “I know where to take you” and he then took the SAR person to the campsite that had called in the report. Dom seemed to wake up in a flash and was out of the tent by the time I could barely give him my headlamp. He snatched it and went off with the SAR person. To me it felt like he was gone a long time so I poked my head out of the tent and the scene was surreal in the sense that there were 12-15 headlamps within 10-40 feet with everyone talking at once. Dom, finally, got back and I breathed a sigh of relief and fall right back asleep.
We awoke at 7am and could finally see our campsite since we had previously arrived at night and couldn’t see it well. Good God our campsite was awesome! We had a perfect view of Broken Hand Pass and could see right away how gnarly it was. We went to the creek and filtered some water, ate some granola bars, and got on the trail by 8am. Before we started the trail a man named Greg, who we had briefly met at the 4WD trailhead the day before, swung by our camp. We chatted briefly and he told us he was doing the Needle solo and that he saw a bunch of SAR vehicles late last night. He took off and we got on our way.
We had hiked in pretty far the day before that we had chopped off a ton of mileage on Humboldt Peak already. Dom sets the waypoint on his GPS for our campsite and we started heading up the trail towards the ridge. We reached the ridge and found this one marmot just hamming it up for our cameras. He was a cool dude. Dom and I got a great shots of him on this little rock precipice.