After two nights in Gates of the Arctic National Park, it was time for us to leave. Our guide called the hanger by satellite phone and our planes were slightly delayed due to the rain and clouds. But we ate breakfast and broke down our camp in preparation for leaving. We got lucky in that it had started raining the prior afternoon and rained throughout most of the night, but the rain stopped and the sky lightened up as we were preparing to depart.

I’m packed up and heading for the gravel bar in the first photo. I hated to leave all those blueberry plants next to our tent which is most of the low red plants in the photo.

We were smiling when we got to Gates and we were still smiling when we left Gates as you can see in the second photo.

Emilie, our guide, asked us to help “clear the runway” before the planes arrived. You can see me clearing the runway in the third photo. The runway was between Andrew, April, and myself.

One of our planes is coming in and just clearing the Ambler River in the fourth photo.

We had a great time in Gates but we were ready to move on to the next leg of our adventure.