This being human is a guest house ( Read more... )

RCW 79A.60.430
Vessels carrying passengers for hire on whitewater rivers - Safety requirements.
( See the legalese. )

...is worth overdoing. That was their mantra.

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I am a river runner. From way back. My father got me started, in canoes first. When I was very small he would put me in the bow of the canoe, tell me to paddle, and surf the canoe in river waves. We used to camp by creeks up on the plateau, and he'd let us take the insulite pads that we slept on and go hiking up the stream to float back down on ( Read more... )

They spend all day in their dripping wet rainforest camp. The men stay in their tents and their sleeping bags as if they existonly only to live in them. The women do what the men are always too tired or too uninterested or too caught up in a conversation about sport or politics to be bothered doing. They work. They peel vegetables. They ( Read more... )

Here is Colleen Laffey's recent piece on the Gauley River in West Virginia. Colleen is a professional videographer, and a paddler, so she has collected a lot of amazing clips on this river over the years. Her profile of the Gauley really captures the playful and international flavor of the boating gathering that occurs there each fall, and it has ( Read more... )

Here's a photo of a typical river camp along the section of the San Juan where we were. Imagine however that the area that they are camped on is under 10 feet of roiling fast brown water, and you'll have an idea what it looked like that day in May. And we were in little playful whitewater kayaks, not rubber barges.

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I was ready, well past ready really, to have my own raft. My crew that day was a set of four thick-bodied men wearing gold jewelry. They had not bothered to take off their gold watches, saying "it's waterproof". They said they were "bean counters" from New York, and would not explain to me what a bean counter was. That was our bad beginning.

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Every time I talk with certain old friends, we trade stories from our years of working and playing on the river. I have so many such stories that when someone asks me to tell them a story, I have trouble selecting a single one to tell. I have long thought that I should tell those stories in my journal. So I will begin. Mind you, many of these ( Read more... )

Went paddling with Susan again today. The river was running about 900 CFS, which is headed toward low water. Susan has a torn hamstring and was more uncomfortable than usual in her boat, but the water was the lowest we've seen it yet, so it balanced out. We're getting comfortable paddling together. It was a lovely warm day ( Read more... )