With hours to kill, Leonard &...

With hours to kill, Leonard & I got serious about our night's sleep. There were already flat bivy spots, but we tossed small gravel to fill the spaces in the big gravel, then got down and flipped individual pebbles to get the flat sides up and even. It was mindless, but we slept better than I've slept outdoors anywhere else, before or since. We both talked about waking up at night to look at the stars. In the morning we compared notes and found we'd both awakened, pried our eyes open -- Yup, there's the stars -- and dropped straight off to sleep again.

We kept trying to convince us the forest fires to the N wouldn't be a problem. They weren't. July, 1985.