Day 3: Static

Did you know that cheetah print duct tape is actually cheaper than the plain ol' silver kind?

Because it is. And it prevents blisters like a dream.

Day three, we took our summit packs and headed on up to climb Static. There were tons of gorgeous streams, rivers, waterfalls and several sketchy snow bridges to cross.

The whole way up, Kugath kept saying how we weren't going to need ice axes because static was on the Southern side of this big saddle so it'd be getting more sun. So, we get to this saddle:

Here is what we were coming from:

Yes, those are wildflowers. The hike up was pretty mucky and muddy due to everything melting, so we were all excited to get some potentially dry ground.

This is what greeted us on the other side of the saddle:

Welcome to Mordor, yo.

Fortunately, we all made it to the top despite the fight against plummeting temperatures and fairly strong (we ended up finding out they were 40 mph gusts) winds.

One of the craziest phenomenons we saw while hiking in the Tetons, was what we later researched and found out to be convergent lady bugs:

On the tops of several of the peaks, we saw just stock piles of lady bugs. Apparently they all fly to an elevation that they deem good as a group and hang out there.

On the way back, Russ and I split from the group (it was planned, don't worry, we weren't just running amuck while everyone was worried or anything like that) and leisurely hiked back to camp.

 We were super glad to be heading back, I was pretty cold and I really don't warm up easily. So, we set up our tent (we had enough of getting rained on in sleeping bags. Been there, done that, moving on)

and just hung out:

Until our tent started to collapse from the weight of the rain. 

Russell ventured into the freeze and found us two sticks to finagle into place.

With the assistance of duct tape and a bra, of course.

We found out our tent is not water proof/resistant in any way shape or form, so we both scurried out to get our tarp out from underneath and rig it up above our tent. As we both got out of the tent, we looked up to see this guy:

He was only 5 feet away from us when we got out of the tent and actually started walking towards us, which (not gonna lie) freaked me out a little bit. I scared him off a little bit by sneaking back into the tent to grab my camera.