East Bank Baker Lake — Saturday, May. 18, 2019

One of my favorite things about backpacking is that the people you meet on the trail are always great people. This most recent trip changed that.

We hiked to Noisy Creek camp and arrived around 1 pm to find most of the campsites full. We looked around and eventually found that our only option was a flat area somewhat near another tent. Generally, in these scenarios people are very accommodating and are happy to have you stay near them. Not today. This is the first time, in hundreds of nights in the woods, that another camper has asked me to leave. First they said that a group of boy scouts had kept them up the night before and they didn't want that to happen again. Then they said their large group (taking up nearly the entire camp) was there to celebrate and they wanted their privacy. (They had canoed in with a keg of beer, which makes the good night sleep reasoning a bit less sound.)

We explained that we were supposed to be meeting friends at this campsite and there weren't any other campsites for several miles, so we set up our tents. After a few hours of waiting, our friends never showed up and we thought maybe they had gotten confused and gone to the southern trailhead. A couple other groups came down looking for a camp and we asked if they had seen our friends. Finally, one of the groups said that yes, they had seen them LEAVING the Noisy Creek camp. We took off running after them, but they had a large head start and we didn't catch up after running a mile down the lake.

The next day, after hiking out we found out that they had come down to Noisy Creek and asked about us, but the same group that told us to leave, told them that "your friends aren't here."

I've never experienced anything like this while backpacking and it was definitely a big bummer. Maybe it was all a big misunderstanding, but it really felt malicious.

Other than that, the trip was great. The weather was perfect and the views were incredible. The trail is in really good shape except for a few spots with downed trees that require some pretty easily scrambling to climb over.