Originally Posted by sdsearch

But like I said, cancelling may return the room to paid availability (though possibly at a higher rate than you have now) but not to award availability, if you didn't verify at the time of booking that the same room was available for points with the same two-night minimum (which you haven't stated).

I suggest, at the very least, that first you try a test booking search for the same hotel on a nowhere-near-the-eclipse date and see if your room type is one of the room types available for reward nights or not. (Presumably on such a search you'll see that way fewer room types are probably available for reward nights than for paid nights, if try both types of searches for the same date that has both rewards nights and paid nights available.)

I suggest you want to be armed with as much understanding of what might be possible before you make that call. In one case, you may be asking BW just to change a room from paid to reward, in another case you may be asking BW to declare a room that's normally not available for a reward as an exception reward, and if you don't the difference, you won't appreciate the much greater difficulty of the latter compared to the former.