We woke up to dark gray skies and pouring rain.  Pat said it rained and blew all night. The forecast is for rain all day and rain/snow tomorrow. This would be followed by at least 2 days of mud, and then it’s supposed to rain on Saturday again. The weather service issued a severe storm warning 3 hours ago and the nearby Wind River range is expecting 2 more feet of snow. We decided to call it.  We can’t keep fighting the weather like this.  We will take 2 to 3 weeks off then meet in Glacier / Waterton and do it SOBO.

We loaded into the truck and drove back to Bairoil to retrieve our food cache. At least this solves the problem of how to pick up the paint bucket. We then drove back to Denver.  I have a flight to Seattle at 10:00 pm, arriving home at midnight.  With any luck I will be home around 1:00 am.

This really sucks, but it seems the only logical choice.  Even if we could hike the Basin, that would only buy us 8 days or so and everything else would still be snowed in.  This way we can wait until the trail is truly open and do the remainder in one shot instead of all this jumping around.