The Devils Stairs trail in the Jedediah Smith Wilderness

OK, Bug Hole isn't really the name of this beautiful location - it's what I named it after a night of battling the incredible swarms of mosquitoes. Remember the scene in Alfred Hitchcocks, The Birds, where Tippi Hedron is trapped in a phone booth, with thousands of birds trying to attack her? That's how I felt as I huddled in the tent with masses of skeeters crawling over the surface of the tent, hoping that I'd lean my arm against the the nylon mesh long enough for them to rip off a little more blood. It's worth the pain though.

This is a beautiful spot, bugs or not. I set up camp not far from the tiny lake (moose bog?) in the upper photo. The boulder in the lake is house-sized. Trails made by moose lace the willows at water's edge, while marmots and pikas were everywhere on the rocky talus slope just behind my camp.

Pikas are often called rock rabbits. They are cool little critters that store small haystacks among the rocks to supply them with food during the long months of winter.

In this photo, you can just make out my tent, the venerable Zoid, huddled in the trees below the cliff. Sometime around midnight, I was awakened by the sound of a moose crashing through the trees just outside my tent. I listened as the animal, or animals, made their way down to the small lake and splashed in. Just as I dozed off again, a huge crash nearly made me jump through the top of the Zoid. An avalanche of rock thundered down from the high cliffs behind my camp, shaking the ground and making me wish that I had camped a bit further out in the meadow. Thunder, lightning, rock slides, hordes of bloodthirsty skeeters, and big hairy, loud-farting moose - it just doesn't get any better than that.