We started our day at the McCarthur Lake boat launch before daylight with our packs ready for a day in the mountains and even enough supplies to spend the night. We navigated the most challenging bushwhacking section on White Mountain within the first few hours thanks to our multiple scouting trips this summer. Once we hit White Mountain, we headed down trail 453, which was a nice runnable trail along the ridgeline to Dodge peak. Once we arrived at the summit of Dodge Peak, we ran out of trail and bushwhacked down a steep hillside until we hit a road that lead down into the Pearson Creek drainage and followed that road down to Pack River Road - two weeks later, there was a grizzly attack in this area. Once we hit the Pack, we spent some time freshening up in the river and restocking our water supply before our climb up to Fault Lake.
The Fault Lake trail (trail 59) follows an old logging trail until it opens up above the tree line and into the granite slabs and scree fields that surround the lake. Fault lake is spectacular but it was a circus up there and every campsite was full with more groups of campers hiking in. At this point, Weston was hitting a wall so we hung out at the lake for awhile amongst the crowd until he felt like climbing up the pass that was looming above us. We had to travers the granite slabs to the pass and found ourselves in a peaceful meadow. Weston was beginning to turn a corner and we begun the decent to Hunt Lake, which was a gnarly bushwhack - by this time, our legs and arms were covered in cuts and gashes.
Hunt lake was windy and it almost looked as if a storm was about to roll in. We quickly topped off our water supply and found ourselves struggling to navigate our way to the trailhead as it was mostly boulder hopping. We could see Priest Lake as we descended on a rough road that got smoother the further we ran. After a couple of miles, a car passed us to ask if we’d lost anything and it turned out we’d lost a water filter, so we backtracker a half mile up the mountain, fetched it and headed back down. The rest of the way down was smooth and uneventful as we cruised down some well maintained logging roads until we arrived at the car we had parked near where the ICT meets East Shore Drive - the road that runs along the lake. We finished our 41.5 mile trek of the ICT in 13:56:41 and freshened up in Priest Lake as the sun was starting to set behind the mountains to the West.