This is not Night 16

When I woke up this morning I thought for sure I would be spending night 16 in ANWR. Only nights 10-15 were scheduled for ANWR. Around 7:00a.m. I unzipped the tent only to look out and see what the weather was like. I could not see the peaks around me. I could not see down or up the valley. The day before it had snowed most of the day. There were some blue holes that poked through but they did not last, and they did not get big. Before bed last night I proclaimed there was a river of blue for a short stretch of the valley. Then I revised that declaring it was a creek of blue. We were an optimistic group. As much as we didn’t want to leave the refuge, we also didn’t want to get stuck there in the cold. Because it was cold. I had another evening of warming my feet on Rebecca’s stomach. She is a good friend. She said the wild thing is that when my feet go from total numbness to feeling, she can feel the difference in my tissue. She knows as much as I do when they are functional again.

I had not had anything that bad happen to my feet since the first night. But before that, I can’t remember the last time something like that had happened. It might have been 20 years. It might have been never. They were really bad.