We're done. We spent a good part of today in the broken and unstable zone at around 9800' - 9900'. This was the rattiest zone we've had to drill through for the entire hole opening effort and it seemed to want to grab the bit at every opportunity. We spent about four hours just rotating on bottom trying to grind rubble and flush cuttings out of the hole. Although we generated a small mountain of cuttings, whenever we put weight on bit, the drill string would bind. After a half dozen of these sticking episodes, Bruce and I decided that we had had about as many warnings as anyone deserves. We talked over the options, and it was pretty clear that the deeper we drilled into - or even past - this unstable zone, the greater was our risk of permanently "planting" the drillstring in the hole. Under the circumstances, we decided that the prudent course of action was to declare hole opening complete and get out of the hole while we still could. Although we were not able to get down to the solid interval of pillows below the bad zone, we believe that, when we do the casing job, we can go in with a cutting shoe on the bottom of the 5" casing and wash and drill down to the solid formation. Even if we can't, that is preferable to getting the drill string stuck and having to spend a lot of time and money trying to retrieve it or work around it. So, this will be the last update for a while - at least until we get back underway to set casing after the logging program is complete.