We were pretty excited to walk up to the ranger station. Gary Cox, one of the rangers there took a photo of us on the last few feet of the trail:

Gary really managed to surprise us when we got in. We were expecting terrible stories about how it would be impossible to get out or get our gear back. Instead, he said, "Do you want some food and a beer before we tow your car out? I should get your addresses so that I can mail you your gear when I can pick it up."

Excellent! They had fresh carrots from some sort of insulated greenhouse they built up there. (It did a bit toward giving us back the seven pounds that we'd both lost on the trip.)

I was pretty happy to eat those, but, surprisingly, I wasn't all that hungry. About half a mile back, we'd polished off the last little bit of food, except for this powerbar: (I'm not sure what I'm going to do with it, but I doubt it'll get eaten.)

So, Gary towed us out using his big Ford truck. That thing certainly had no troubles in deep snow and bad roads. Mark and I concluded that next time, we'd bring a truck like his!

Getting towed out is more exciting than you might think. Zipping along at 30 mph, 6 feet behind a vehicle that's easily twice the size of our rental Neon, while getting splattered with so much snow that your wipers can't keep up was a bit more excitement than we really wanted at the moment.

However, Gary did get us out. It looked as though we'd done only minor damage to the Neon. However, when we got on the road again, we noticed that the ventilation system wouldn't switch to "fresh", and the suspension made cool noises, and reverse made even more amazing noises. We decided to try to mask the fact that we'd done anything interesting at all with the vehicle by taking it to a car wash. However, the car wash fixed all the problems.

Yes, yes. I know these additional stories are less than exciting, but this is the epilogue! It's supposed to be filled with dull, anticlimactic stories.

Well, we decided to stay in a hotel that night before telling Poison Spider what happened to Mark's rental bike. (We weren't looking forward to that.) While there, Mark took a photo of my knees. It looks pretty disgusting, though, and several people in my research group have already asked me to not put it on the net. So, just imagine a big, swollen, bruised blob halfway down my leg.

We can't tell this story without saying once again how great Poison Spider was. They currently don't have a web page, but you can go to their web non-page here. They didn't want to charge Mark for the time that the bike was sitting in the Elaterite Basin. Mark decided to get greedy, though, and bought the bike. (Well, it used to be in really good shape, and they gave him a good deal on it.) Maybe he'll sell his old bike when this one comes in.

Here's a couple of Poison Spider photos for you. Click on the right one if you want directions to their store.

Finally, we managed to make our flight the next day, and Brielle met us at the airport. Because of that, she is the only friend of ours who heard the story when we weren't sick of telling it! Everyone else gets to hear the details from this page. Hopefully, it's complete enough for y'all!