Thursday July 31, 17.2mi/27.7km

Sulphur Creek (308.2/5640ft) to Marsh Creek Camp (291.0/6480ft) (ID)

I didn’t get to sleep until after 10pm so I woke up a little later, and as I was packing up, I noticed a few buildings nearby. I must have camped at the edge of someone’s ranch, oops. I quickly left and continued down the nice trail.

The forest was still all burned but since I wasn’t looking for a camp spot right now I didn’t really care. A couple miles later I arrived to the Boundary Campground area, where there were buildings and Forest rangers and cars and lots of river guides launching their rafts into the river.

It was a hectic place but I poked around to find a forest ranger to report the new forest fire I had seen the night before. He had actually just received reports of it earlier that morning, one of the guide services had messaged their headquarters who called it in. So I went to the nearby pavilion to have a snack and sit on a nice big bench. Leaving the camping area, I noticed I was back in a green forest again.

Pretty soon I crossed the Middle Fork River, just above the famous cataract called Dagger Falls.

The middle Fork of the Salmon River gets about 11,000 people rafting down it every year, all of the trips start just below Dagger Falls, since above it would be unsurvivable. Leaving behind all the development, I was back in the wilderness and hiked along the remainder of the Middle Fork River for the rest of the afternoon.

So much of this area had burned in the last decade, and without any shade it felt pretty hot.

Finally after an hour of hiking, I was back in a green forest again.

The temperatures are actually quite pleasant when there was a forest with some shade. Sometimes the trail was high above the Middle Fork.

And sometimes right next to it on little rocky ledges.

Towards the end of the day, I got to the point where the Middle Fork ended, and split into Marsh Creek and Bear Creek. Marsh Creek was still pretty big, and it didn’t look easily crossable either. The guidebook says in low water, I could cross Marsh Creek to get to a Hot Springs, but the crossing looked questionable. So I continued upstream following Marsh Creek on the trail.

After an hour of hiking along that creek, it dwindled smaller and smaller, which was neat to see. Eventually I crossed it on a little bridge and hiked through my last burned area of the day. This was an old burn area and clearly the trail crews had done a lot of work.

At the very end of the day, I exited the Frank Church Wilderness and arrived at a little trailhead, called the Marsh Creek Transfer camp.

There were a couple little campsites nearby which had picnic tables, and best of all they were free. I setup my tent before the next round of thunderstorms came through. It was still early, just after 5pm, but the next possible camping spot isn’t for another 5 miles, and I was already ahead of schedule after last night’s bonus miles. Now that I’m out of the Wilderness, the hiking should be a little easier tomorrow.