DAY 3: The first half of this day was great, but had we noticed the 'Grim Reaper' in the 4th photo, we would have known that this would have turned out to be one of the worst days we'd ever spent hiking. We headed down the Snake again, starting ~7 AM, and passed through many old homesteads. These were marked by old fences; the houses disappeared long ago. Along the way we ran across a male Bighorn Sheep slowly walking towards us. It began to increase its speed a bit and Jos and I debated on the best course of action should the Sheep decide to ram us (we decided that we would face our packs to it...). Luckily it didn't come to that and it took off up the river, but it came within 50 yards of us. Farther down the river we ran across a large barn that is used sporadically throughout the year to house livestock and equipment used to take hunting parties up into the canyon. Here we found a male and female Western Screech Owl. They let us get quite close to them and posed for photos. We also played around with a grass snake and Jos found some baby ground birds (can't remember the name of them). Moving on past the barn, we found the cabins used by the hunting parties and two guys were working on remodeling them. The first 2 people we had seen on land during the hike (the rafters and boaters in the water didn't count). We talked to them for a bit and they offered us beer (but we took their water, instead), and learned all about what the barn and cabins were used for, as well as the animals we should be able to see on our return up the canyon (e.g. bear, cougar, rattlesnake, elk). They had seen a herd of ~400 elk a few days prior. We left them in the heat and made our way up Temperance Creek on the way out of the canyon. We passed a group of youth corps workers starting their trail repairs for the summer... starting from the Snake and working their way up. Had they started a month earlier, our remaining miles would have been great. We had 5-6 miles to hike up Temperance Creek and right off the bat the trail could not be found. We hiked through the creek a couple hundred yards and stopped for lunch. When we got moving again, we lost the trail again, and when it was found so was the jungle of poison ivy and stinging nettles. These two joined us for about the next 3 miles completely covering the trail for hundreds of yards forcing us to hike through the creek, filling our boots with water. This was the worst part of the trip and is evident by the two pictures of Jos down in the gallery. We put our cameras in our backpacks and splashed our way up the creek, eventually gaining some elevation, revealing more of the trail. We took the trail for the rest of the day, running across a first and then a second rattlesnake right on the trail. They didn't pay us any attention, until I poked each of them with a stick to see if they were indeed rattlesnakes... and they were. Our cameras were still in our packs, so we took them out after seeing the 2nd snake because we thought there were bound to be more... but there weren't. We made our way up the trail some more as a severe thunderstorm hit the valley we were hiking up. The thunder was shaking the ground, and we were getting poured on (our pants and boots were already soaked). We made it to 'Wisnor's Place, which was marked on the map, and turned out to be an old 2-story house that sheltered us from the storm for the next 36 hours. In the last push to the house across a large field we saw a herd of ~50 elk... not sure if it was the '400' the guys down at the river were talking about, but they were still cool until they ran away from us. There were also lots (~10 combined) of big ticks.
