Does anyone have a report on the bug situation? We are traveling July 29th-31st. Anything else we should know about the trail? Thanks.
I forgot I asked this, so I'll post the update for those who are interested. We started at Sugar Bay, dropped one car at the trail head there and the other at the parking lot next to the church near Red House. We did run into some bugs, nothing biting, but just lots of buzzing around. It wasn't too bad. Where our trip took a turn was when we spent the night at the Willow Bay camp site. I should have known something was going to go down when we walked in and saw tons of families cooking outside with portable grills and leaving them on their picnic tables when the sun went down. We pitched out tents and hung our food bag in a tree about 12-15ft off the ground. I woke the next morning around 06:30 to my buddy saying, "****, bears in the camp." Poked my head out of the tent to see Mama Bear about 30 feet away from us tearing into our food bag. Now the branch we hung our bag from was small and could no way support a 150b black bear.......However, it was not a problem from two little baby bears. Moms Bear had sent her babies up the tree to grab our bag. Apparently, unbeknownst to us, this is a common problem at Willow Bay. My buddy fired a water bottle at Mama Bear and they all took off. By this time other campers were up watching Mama Bear and her two babies walk right down the middle of the camp ground. We talked to some other campers and they said this is such a problem that they have been trapping bears all summer and relocating them.
So since the bears ate pretty much everything we had, we turned around and hiked the same section back to the car. We'll try it again this year once the weather breaks and we'll be sure to pick a better spot to hang our food.