Night 7 Finish

I guess I'm done?

It rained all last night, from before I set my tent up until a brief respite in the morning. By the time I was dressed in full waterproofs, it was raining again. During the night it was not the normal "it always does this" sprinkle, but heavier. In the morning when I climbed up to the bowl where my pass was, I really needed it to be the one very low spot that I could actually see, and not further into the completely socked-in drainage. To my delight, it was. A very gentle grade, with snow completely avoidable. The slope angle shading didn't even register a color on the climb side, and that proved true. It was, however, quite cold at the summit so I couldn't hang around and enjoy my last climb. 

The descent was gentle, but long, and by the time we met our first inlet creek, I realized that all the water was raging and turbid. I'm up high enough, I can choose whichever side I want, and if I pick correctly this creek goes straight to the highway where there's a bridge, so which side will give me the least worrisome inflow? I chose river left. 

That worked fine for ten miles, until only a mile or two shy of the highway, a normally tranquil inlet was now opaque and raging down the hillside. It took me a bit of doing, but I managed to slowly split off branches of the stream bit by bit, and in five separate pieces it wasn't too bad. Yesterday I would have barely noticed the thing. Instead because of the rain, I had to work myself up for it and repeat my trekking-pole enabled mantra of "I am a quadruped! I am a quadruped!" as I took each deliberate step.

That was the last barrier before the highway. The rain was polite enough to stop for a few hours, so I cooked dinner (beans, of course!) and am camped within sight of the road. The weather is supposed to be meh tomorrow--not quite as bad as today, but probably not peakbagging weather. So if I can't see the summit of the mountains, I'll go check out the pipeline a bit, see where the creek I was following (the Roche Moutonnee, according to the bridge on the highway) flows into the Atigun River, and then try and hitch south, maybe to Coldfoot.

Seven nights in ANWR, pretty good.

If anyone spoils who won Western States before I can watch the Livestream from beginning to end, so help me God...

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