“It’s still raining,” was one of the first things Mingo told me this morning as he chomped down on one of his “last real breakfasts” before he leaves. “Then I’ll be eating MRE’s (Meals Ready to Eat) for 60 days. At least they’re better than C-Rats,” he joked between bites (or whatever he was having; I forgot to ask).

Mingo made it to Boise, ID yesterday in the early evening, checked into his hotel, and began pouring over the maps again until he crashed. “I think I’m going to spend two extra days in Yukon Charley. I want to do some 20-mile radius hikes out from the river. It’s supposed to be gorgeous country. Then I’m going to push to Galena, 100-mile days on the water. It doesn’t look like there is much between Yukon Charley and Galena but I could get out there and be surprised.” Mingo then went on to tell me that he plans on taking a full rest day in Galena to see the town, pick up and organize his resupply packages, and just generally relax before heading out into Yukon River again. His voice has a mixture of unbridled excitement and some anxiousness: “I’m still unsure of what I’m going to find when I get to the Bering Sea. It could be a calm sea or it could be nasty.”

As we finish up the call (the first of many short ones today), he says that he’s going to get as close to the Canada border as possible tonight. Later in the day, he decides he’s going to stop in Okanogan for the night. I hop online and find him a hotel in Omak (a few miles north of Okanogan).

My phone rings again as he gets just outside of Ellensburg, WA to check on the hotel reservations. “It stopped raining for awhile, but now it’s starting to cloud up again,” he tells me. I relay the hotel info to him and we chat for a few more minutes about mundane things. I hang up with him thankful that I’ve gotten to talk to him so many times today - if only for a few minutes. In a few short days, I will get just a few precious minutes to find out what he’s doing, what gorgeous territory he’s seen, and how balmy the Yukon water is that day.