Lowell, Idaho

I picked up a family of earwigs in Cambridge. This would not have been noteworthy except that several appear on a daily basis from the seams and pockets of my panniers. Steve has the same problem. Several nights I woke to find the screen of my tent covered in upwards of 50 of the critters. We are just now seeing diminishing numbers of our earwig farm; I only found three of them today, all in my sleeping bag.

We have been following the trail Chief Joseph and his tribe took as they fled from General Howard in the late 1800s. There is a lot of roadside documentation about Joseph and the Nez Perce. Very neat. And we met a local Nez Perce who told us about the tribe as it is now.

It happened not to rain today. The first dry night in six days. Yesterday we camped in Kooskia and the rain came so suddenly that we went out to tie down our rain flies and couldn’t return to our tents because it would have flooded the interior with water. Steve and I found shelter in a covered picnic area. When the rain had slowed, we returned to our tents, but we were soon awakened by automatic sprinklers pelting the everloving crap out of the side of our tents. We did not sleep much.