Ok, so remember how I mentioned those clouds? Well within an hour, all of a sudden there were LOTS of them. And then, you guessed it, it started to rain. HARD. So out came the rain ponchos (and we discovered that 3 of them were really old and didn't work so well).

Everyone is still smiling here, but that's because we thought it was going to blow over quickly. It didn't. Instead, it started hailing (marble size), the dog was yelping, we were all getting pelted, and lightning was bouncing off the granite a couple hundred yards above our heads.

Not exactly a safe place to be in a thunderstorm. Especially since the next stretch in the hike is by far the hardest - at this point, we're only about a mile and a half from the lake, but you have to climb up a very steep scree field (that means lots of rocks, from the size of your cat to your kitchen table, all of them loose and shifting). Then it gets steeper, and you climb up a shoot, with rocks the size of Volkswagons. And you hyperventilate and curse the person who brought you on this hike. So that's what lies ahead. And when you add a whole bunch of water and lightning (think 'getting electrocuted while slipping on loose boulders'), well, it doesn't exactly make for very happy campers.