Glacier 4 I finally got up and started poking around about 910:30 in the morning. The biologist’ were already out trying to collect their samples and the other group had packed out. I headed off skirting the edges of the meadows and began collecting dry branches off of standing dead trees. After an hour or so I had a pretty good pile of wood to work with and Rachel and I built a nice fire. The biologists came back about the time we got the fire going. They had decided that they were going to call off their efforts for the day as the rain and snow from the night before would skew their data. So they set about breaking their camp. They were very appreciative of the fire. Evidently they had tried to get one going earlier in the morning with no avail. Once the fire was going we made ourselves some breakfast. It is amazing how good a bowl of oatmeal can taste. To cook on I had bought this MSR rocket from a store near the airport. You really can’t expect to get through airport security with a backpacking stove so I had planned on buying one when I got there. MSR makes great gear and this is a great little stove. We had more cooking equipment than we needed and most of it was left back in the car. What we did take were some of these nifty little squishy bowls and cups, a small teakettle and a small pot and we really didn’t need much else. We had bought a several freeze-dried meals and some of which were marginal and others were really good. For example that evening we had chicken and dumplings for dinner and it was really really good. We wound up taking a few short hikes that day but mostly we just enjoyed tending the fire and drying a few things out. Rachel did take the time to open up an emergency blanket and tape it up to the insides of our tent. She wanted to minimize the drafting we were experiencing. IT worked too! Mid afternoon a solo backpacker joined us. Adam Brown. Adam had hiked across the park starting on the west side and heading east. He had spent the night at a much higher elevation and he said the storm was really interesting. Adam works for the Appalachian Trail and we really enjoyed sitting around the fire and talking with him through the night. Other than a few white tail deer, we didn’t see any big animals in the Belly River valley. We did however have quite the show with some smaller critters. The biologist had warned me to make sure to not leave anything un attended. Evidently the squirrels had gotten into a couple of their packs and made a bit of a mess. And there was no shortage of squirrels in the pine grove where we were camping. At this time of year they are busy collecting pinecones, which they store for later consumption. It is my understanding that grizzly bears will raid their pinecone caches later in the year. We got a big kick out of watching these little guys cut and pitch pine cones to the ground. Thy would rocket up a tree, work their way out to the end of the branch and begin to one by one cut each pine cone from the tree and throw it to make sure it fell to the ground. After working to cut and toss perhaps 10 to 20 pine cones they would come down the tree and scurry them off to their storage areas. They were upset that Rachel and I were just hanging around and clearly interfering with their chores. They didn’t mind us while they were cutting the cones, but when they came down to start collecting them, they were clearly irritated. And they would let us know it by climbing back up a tree, heading out to the end of a branch and then bark and carry on until they gave up and decided they had to get back to work. So they would come back down and start gathering the pinecones in spite of our presence. We also had quite the experience with a coopers hawk. Raptors are migrating this time of year and sometimes you get a chance to see something that is really cool. There was a cooper’s hanging out around our camp area that I had seen several times. Un like the squirrels he didn’t seem to mind up at all, this made me think that he was in migration from points north where he wasn’t familiar with people. He whacked a robbin right behind me while I was sitting on log then flew over to another log a few yards away and began to pluck it. That evening a great horned owl began to call and then I believe a borrowing owl joined in. I fell asleep listening to them calling from the edge of the near by meadow. We woke up to Glaciers very own alarm clock. One of the squirrels had perched right above our tent and was actually bouncing pine cones off of it. When he got ready to gather them up, he let loose such a chatter that I believe he winded himself. With that we got up and began to break camp, and prepare for our walk out.