We all ate a hearty dinner and enjoyed the fire as long as we could. We then placed all our gear into the campground's bear lockers and headed to the building with our sleeping bags. Andra and I decide to squeeze into the wood storage room and Dave chose to sleep on the porch.

If anyone ever asks me if I've ever taken Andra to the wood shed, I can honestly answer yes! After shoving the wood chips to one side, we deployed our sleeping bag. To avoid laying on the cold stone floor, we combined our sleeping pads and both slept in my sleeping bag. Cramped yes, but the worst part was the heat. I was so hot, I couldn't sleep!

Sleeping at the building turned out to be a good call. The snow started back up right as we were hitting the sack and had we setup tents, I would have been shedding snow off the tent all night. I set my alarm for 7am (about sunrise). Since temps are 10 below zero before sun up, I didn't think it practical to start any earlier. When my alarm went off, I headed into the campground to get our gear from the bear lockers.

The warm temps and melting snow the day before created another unexpected problem. The water had run down into the locking shafts and froze overnight. It didn't take long to break the locker open that had Dave's equipment and Andra's locker opened just fine, but no such luck on mine. It was sealed shut. I broke out my Leatherman and started chiseling away at the ice. I removed all the external ice I could, but the shaft wouldn't budge. Dave started looking through his gear for a lighter, but I wondered how effective a Bic lighter would be on a big steal storage locker covered in ice and snow when it was just above zero outside. I kept kicking and flexing the door and the locking shaft. It seemed like forever, but before Dave could find his lighter, I broke the shaft free and extracted my backpack and all of our food. (Mental note: bear lockers can freeze shut, avoid use in winter)