December 22, 2015 at 11:04AM

For the first 91 days of our year in the Boundary Waters the sun has risen a couple minutes later and set a few minutes earlier. Last night (10:48 PM CST) was the winter solstice in the northern hemisphere, which marks the longest night of the year. Tomorrow will be 6 minutes longer than today, and each day we will be blessed with a little more light until the summer solstice 6 months from now.

To celebrate the longer days ahead we made luminaries of ice to decorate our campsite. We spent several hours filling special balloons with water and placed them in the snow to freeze overnight. It would be relatively easy to attach each ballon to your kitchen faucet and turn on the tap, but with no tap for miles around we devised a system of gathering water from the ice hole, filling our @kleanKanteen narrow mouth water bottle, blowing up the ballon, stretching the ballon over the mouth of the water bottle, and pouring the water into the balloon. We repeated this about twenty times to make our four luminaries. We smiled and laughed as we lit our luminaries last night around 3:30 PM as it started getting dark.

This is a special place, a place worth protecting. Please help us speak loudly for this quiet place. Sign the petition at http://ift.tt/1x2erSX.
#wildernessyear #savetheBWCA #solstice #winter #BWCA @patagonia #onlyinMN