Day 1

So what was the river like after we left the naked raft guide ornament sitting on edge of the water.

Well, day 1 was a quick float if you will with the guides needing to do some minor paddling to avoid eddies and occassionally some major paddling when they got their rafts caught in them (NOTE: For those who don't know, an eddie is basically a calm part of the river that is out of the current. It's good to use when you want to slow down or take a break, but often a pain to get out of once you're in it.)

We had broken into three groups when we arrived. Well, four, really.

The lead boat was manned by Rick and contained Ron, Mary Ann, and Marsha. Josh followed in the second boat with Joe, Frank, and Gary while Jack and I were in the sweep boat with DeAnna.

The two youngsters, Nick and Ryan, took the inflatable kayaks and were busy using those to paddle around the river. They were suppossed to stay between Josh's raft and DeAnna's raft, but that can be a difficult task when you're new to the kayaks and the river plays some tricks on you. These guys both did incredibly good at the Kayaks. Josh shouted instructions to them before certain rapids and they followed him for the most part. To my knowledge, they never got flipped. Ryan displayed some amazing skills in the kayak and the few times that Nick got pulled into an eddie, he demonstrated just how much strength he's got as he dug his way out.

The boats were set up with two wooden oars for the guides to use piled on top of all of the gear in the rafts. Those of us who were rafters sat in the bow of the boat and depending on the condition of the river we more or less could relax.

Part way down the river, Nick gave me a chance to try out his kayak. As I got seated, DeAnna looked over at me and said, "By the way, in about 20 seconds we're going to hit the biggest rapid of the day."

So I had about 20 seconds to figure out which side of the kayak to paddle on before we got into the rapids. It wasn't really that difficult. Basically, you paddle on the side that you're turned towards. So if you're bow is off center to the left, then you paddle on the left and it pushes you back into line.

As I hit the biggest hole in the rapid, I couldn't quite get the bow pointed straight and I came about two thirds of the way out of the boat and thought I was about to swim, but instead, I was able to lean just enough to fall back into the boat. After the rapids, I let Nick take back over, but at least I accomplished a first, getting into the kayak and trying it out a little.

All of the guides were talented and handled the oars with some great care although one of the guys did get himself stuck in an eddie for about 10 minutes :-)

Part way down, one of the guides saw what they thought was trash in the water of one of the eddies and sent Nick over to fish it out. Nick dipped it out onto his paddle and it turned out to be a dead Ringtail cat.

This one was a baby and looked a little different then the picture above being almost completely white and black. DeAnna was thoroughly grossed out and was an easy target for the rest of the trip about Ringtail jokes. At one point, we thought it might have gotten lodged under our raft as we floated down which really had DeAnna squirming since later in the day she had to dive under her raft to get it lined up on shore correctly.

That night we stayed at Bridge Canyon which is named for a archway in the stone.
The beach here was clean and there was a lot of space to spread out for both our group and a group whose guide, Brady, was a friend of our river guides. We shared cook space with Brady's group and he came to our rescue the next day when our stove was left on the shore.

At both our sites, the guides set up a toilet which I'll post about differently.

The menu for the first night was steak and salmon and brownies cooked in a dutch over. Not bad stuff.