Raft Trip
Last week I took a 3 day raft trip w/ Finn's class on the Colorado River. I've been waiting to post in the hopes that I could get my hands on some good pictures (I didn't bring my camera), but decided that I've waited long enough and should get about the serious business of blogging again.We met up at the school around 6 am and finally pulled out of the parking lot around 7:30 to start a 7 hour drive to the western edge of the state. After shuttling vehicles to the pull-out and the kids prepping the rafts, we didn't put in until around 5:30... quite late for a river start. However, the paddling was easy and we reached our first camp in plenty of time to pitch tarps and have some dinner. The second day was an easy paddle with some side hikes and geology lessons from Thomas Cleary: a teacher, guide, and the logistical mastermind for the trip. We pulled into camp early on the second day at a very nice spot with a visible fault line across the river on a vertical wall. The third day found us on another easy paddle w/ a side hike to see some petroglyphs.
Very ambitious trip for some middle-schoolers, and it struck me that there probably aren't too many schools in the country that would attempt such a thing. The students were (relatively) self-sufficient: making their own camps, sleeping under tarps, cooking and cleaning dishes, and loading and unloading the gear on each raft.
Here is a picture of me and my crew (pulled w/o authorization from Tom Rampton's site... Tom is an experienced River Guide and friend of the school who oared the gear raft for the trip; to see more pics of the trip on Tom's site, click here).
posted by Jay @ 8:40 AM
2 Comments:
Authorized! No problem. I was glad to read what you wrote about this great river trip.
Hey Tom! How was your workshop weekend? We are going to have to create a link of all our friend's blogs so that folks can share your very wonderful site and what all you have going on! Thanks again for the pics--
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