Day 49: May 21, 2026
Persistent Arctic rain arrives, creating a welcome “beautiful day off” with “just not anything to do here.”
-
Yeah, Will here, it's May 21st, day 49. Last night the wind stopped. It cleared off. It was a pretty gorgeous calm night. The clouds came and the east wind was blowing and the rain started this morning about 9 o'clock, 40 degrees, and it's had rain most of the day here. It's really, about 6 o'clock right now and raining pretty steady now. It's good for the breakup, but not much you can do on a day, I'm sure glad I'm not trying to travel today. It would be a tough day to be outside, especially when you can't get in to get dried off. So it was a beautiful day off for me. Actually, I don't ... my real life, I don't get days like this where I don't have obligations or things over my head or undone business that never is finished, and there's just not anything to do here.
So I just ... Well, actually what I did is I fixed the air mattress. I found the leak yesterday. So I slept on a leaky air mattress for 49 nights. But it didn't matter the last week or so because I was on land, but 43 of those days I was on ice. So it's quite a relief actually to have a firm surface, and I took advantage of that by just kind of laying down and with nothing to do. And my motivation is really still real strong despite the weather. I'm productive and doing a lot of list making and stuff I have to do for my departure here. And I'm getting ready also.
Tomorrow I'm going to start talking about the Steger Center on a kind of a daily basis. Tomorrow I'm going to do the origin story, and so what I'm going to do today tomorrow is I'll give a report on what happened today, which will be pretty short.
I'm just waiting it out here. The river is, big changes here in the river actually. It goes up between a foot and a half and two feet a day, and it's covered, it's like doubled its area size since when I got here. It was just a small river, frozen river when I first arrived here six days ago. There's two and a half, three feet of snow here where I'm camped, and now most of that snow is gone just in the last five days, a majority of that. This rain is also going to help the thaw a little bit. But the river is open on the side, and this end is an ice dam building upstream for me. It's still going to be a while, though, before this ice breaks off the river.
Like I mentioned yesterday, it's not like the Mississippi River where you have, you know, two feet of ice, and when it breaks up, that's it. The river is flowing. Here you have, you know, this overflow that freezes to the bottom, and that is, some of that's 10, 15 feet thick. And so the process right now is there is current running from water that's coming from the forest valley right now. But that current will gradually erode underneath these, these big, uh, you know, sections that are frozen thick like that. And then eventually those blocks of ice will pop out. And that's when you have these ice dams and kind of a wild situation of big chunks of ice floating down the river. So it can be quite dramatic. And, um, I think it probably will be here. I don't know about this river, but I do think so. So it's not ... But there is rapid change every day, it's amazing. And I usually take walks up to check the ice dam. But I walked this morning early when I got up. It was still wasn't raining, but it started raining. I went down to that. So, this is fine. This spring weather. So. And then so I'll, I'll be up tomorrow talking about the origin story of the center and the details of what's happening here. I hope everybody's enjoying their spring weather down there. This is Will on the Horton River, day 49, May 21st, over and out.
Will’s position is unchanging as the thaw continues and river breakup unfolds on the Horton. Visit Will’s interactive map for complete control of magnification and orientation.
This video from the 2023 solo expedition shows flowing chunks of ice on a fast moving river, leading to ice dam formation downstream—a phenomenon Will is observing now on the Horton and has described in his last two dispatches.