Day 5: April 7, 2026
Will’s fifth day was necessary breather to continue organizing gear, get into a rhythm, and allowing his "chaotic dreams" to percolate through his subconscious while he gets into shape for this Arctic expedition.
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Hello, this is Will here. I may have had my date confused yesterday, but with some degree of confidence, this is April 6, which is day ... Oh I did it again! April 7 is day 5, and I took the day off today. I have a scheduled day. It's been a pretty tough four days. The first day was mainly just flying in, but day two, three, and four were in quite deep snow relaying and so forth. And I have beautiful weather during that period of time, but it was very exhausting. And I thought it would be great to take a day off here. It's about 8 o'clock in the evening. I slept way in this morning, rested, going to bed relatively early. I worked over equipment. I really needed to get everything organized. Getting to a point now where I have everything organized, I know where everything is, real simple rhythms are starting to kick in.
Always on these solos, the first four days, five days of my dreams are quite chaotic. Many people, maybe many events, all mixed together, especially so on this expedition. No nightmares or anything, but just this huge mix of variations of scenes and people and comedy and ... it's just everything you could imagine. But what I really think it is, this time around, is this crazy time that we're in right now. I haven't taken an expedition since [age] 79, that was three years ago. And during that period of time, the last three years, I basically got the Center on its feet and solvent. Not totally solvent, there's plenty of fundraising to go. I hired out Geoff Seper as my executive director a month ago (a year ago). Julie Hignell managing up in Ely, that's had a lot to do with the reason I'm able to leave. It was a chaotic three years, especially this last year, with social media, AI coming on board. I'm not ... I'm pretty disciplined with social media, not really that interested in it. So I'm not on it. I limit my amount of news. I don't do anything negative. I don't get hooked into that type of a scene, but I belong to the American culture, which even though I may not participate in all the craziness that's going on, I'm still in a culture, with people in a society. That's all. [...] I've never seen it at this point. I think we all understand these times, the government, just everything together. It's almost like a collective nervousness or not quite a nervous breakdown ... but that's what has been boiling up in my mind. All that is getting basically within a week or less all of this chaos disappears in my subconscious. And I'm already getting into a slower pace. And my mind during the day, it's always pretty much in the moment. I don't think about the outside world at all. I'm just not ... it's just not there for me. I'm observing all the time. Watching beautiful around me.
I do think a little bit these first days on equipment, in terms of getting organized. It's not a preoccupation, but I find sometimes I'm just thinking, "how do I pare this down"? And just to get that ... try to get it to a point or I will get it to a point here really soon, where I really don't have to think much about my rhythms. It's just everything's organized that way. And so that's the way I always run expedition teams also. It's just, get everyone in a solid rhythm where we know who does what when, everything goes real ... almost like clockwork. There's not a room for a lot of chaos in that type of situation. But the dreams will ... the dreams for myself tend to smooth out. My sleep, it fortunately has been good. I was behind sleep coming into this expedition as always. I'm still, you know, releasing a lot, but pretty much, you know, I'm really sleeping hard right now, which is the key to getting in shape. And the way I run my life and everyday life when I'm in the city—I'm in the city actually six months out of the year—raising funds ... my, you know, it's all a lot of work. I enjoy everything I do. But my way of staying in shape is trying to stay in rhythm, particularly trying to get some solid sleep. You don't always sleep solid, but this last three or four months I've slept best that I have in the last 25 years, mainly because I've been working hard on the Steger Center and all, you know, always pushing the limit in terms of finances and organizations. But it was great to have this day off. I don't get many days off like this in my real life. And I'm really anxious to start traveling again tomorrow. There's high alto-cumulus clouds coming up, mid-level clouds, which is a sign of a little bit of a warm front coming through. And so ... Anyways, I'm in the tent here, ready for my supper, and then we'll hit the sack here soon. This is Will. Over and out. April 7th, Day 5.
Will’s location at the end of Day 5. He did not travel, so his position is unchanged from yesterday. Visit Will’s interactive map for complete control of magnification and orientation.
Will sees these and predicts warm front
(source: Wikipedia By Bidgee - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6204153)