My sand defense system worked great! I woke up looking at a layer of sand, on the top side of the plastic sheeting. Yay! I'll have to keep that in my pocket for future reference.

Another thing that helped is that it started raining around 4:30am, and it turned to snow around 6am. Then when it was time to rig, the weather cleared up!

Our major rapid today was Horn Creek. We have pretty high water this year, so the easy line was open and we ran it without incident.

We also stopped by Phantom Ranch -- the only source of outside contact for the whole trip. We hung out in the general store for a bit while Jon's satellite phone recharged, and people bought tea and coffee. Eventually though, the magic wore off and we were ready to be back in the wilderness.

We got to camp (Granite Camp) early, so Nick and I went on a quick hike to see what's around there. We're hiking to the rim tomorrow (or, trying to) so we wanted to see what the trail looked like.

There was some wind when we got to camp, but it died down by the time we went to bed, so it's looking like we'll have great weather.