Day 24 - Pinned Down and Covered in Sand

A series of bad choices led to a night of wind, rain and sand.

Last night Jackson and I decided that we would try to sleep outside under the stars, with no tent. Thinking that if it did begin to rain we would simply roll up in the tarp like a burrito and cover ourselves from the rain.   

Mistake #1 - Not setting up a tent. 

After spending 5 minutes lying in the open air and being constantly buzzed by Alaskan mosquitoes, I quickly realized that a tent would be necessary. I set up the inner shell of my tent and neglected to put the waterproof rain fly over the mesh, inner shell. 

Mistake #2 - No rainfly. 

The tent worked beautifuly to ward off the bugs, but not long after I fell asleep a wind started to howl and rain began to fall.

I scrambled out of my sleep and wrestled with the rainfly in the wind to get it on. Without much thought, I hopped back in the tent and fell asleep. 

Mistake #3 - No stakes. 

I woke up in the morning to my tent walls nearly caving in from a ferocious wind. Everything inside the tent, including me, was covered in a layer of sand at least an inch thick. The wind had pelted the tent with sand all night and morning, lifting under my unstaked rainfly and into every nook and cranny available. I quickly reached out of the tent and staked down the 4 corners. For the next several hours I stayed tucked in my tent, covered in sand, listening to the wind paint rain and sand into the wildly loose and flapping rainfly. 

By the time the wind and rain had died down enough to get out of the tent I ventured over twenty or so yards to Jacksons tent. 

“Jackson- you alive?” I jokingly called out. 

Opening the vestibule I looked into his tent to find him lying in his sleeping bag, completely covered, head to toe, in sand. Beard- full of sand, tent floor - covered in sand, sleeping bad- drenched in sand. He got up and wiped the grit out of his hair and beard. We joked around about the circumstances. 

We would spend the rest of the day tent bound, holed up in our sandy homes, lying in our tents simply so they wouldn’t blow away.

We spent some time playing yahtzee in Jacksons tent. At one point my tent lost all its stakes and almost blew away. Luckly, I was able to run it down before it got too far. 

We waited out the day, pinned down in a sandstorm. By evening the weather broke and with 24 hours of sunlight, we decided to take our window of opportunity and get far away from this sandy hell. It was an amazingly calm and beautiful morning on the water with a truly magnificent sunset/sunrise. With no watches or clocks and the midnight sun in season, we found it hard to tell if it was a sunrise or sunset, but either way, it lasted forever.