Ooh, look. Rafting icon.
Jun. 29th, 2010 09:14 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ilanarama(But if you're on LJ you'll have to go to Dreamwidth to see it, because I don't have the icon slots on LJ, and am probably going to eventually delete all my icons but one there anyway. Except not right now, because I'm at the CESM workshop in Breckenridge on an incredibly slow and creaky internet connection, and I'm trying to get work done, and neither my brain nor my computer can cope with too much multitasking at the moment.)
On Saturday afternoon Britt and I put together the bits of the Animas River we have rafted individually in the past couple of weeks, starting at the 32nd St. put-in (actually a bit upstream of it) and taking out at the new bridge by Home Depot - about 7 miles. This is a little far to do a bicycle shuttle, but we talked our friends Doug and Anne into coming with us in their tandem duckie (inflatable kayak) so we had an actual car shuttle.
It was utterly awesome. The thing about the river through town is that for the first part it doesn't actually go along a road, just along the rec path and through parks, and for the second part it's way below the highway, so it's like - well, not exactly a wilderness experience, but definitely a recreational rather than an urban feel. On our previous trips we'd gone on weekday afternoons and had been surrounded by outfitters' rafts full of tourists, and locals out for a short ride, but maybe the outfitters were having a slow weekend and the locals were all doing other things because we only saw a few other boaters. Mostly people were playing on the banks with their dogs - as Britt said, "Half the people out on the river today are dogs."
We tied up about two miles down the river at Rotary Park where our first ever Pridefest was going full swing and had a beer with some friends (we'd promised one friend, who is the mainstay of the local PFLAG, that we'd show up) and then floated downriver, sobering up in time to go through the biggest set of rapids on this run. The first time I did this section was last Wednesday, and Smelter Rapid knocked me sideways and turned me around so I went through Corner Pocket Rapid backwards. Oops? (At least I didn't fall out or flip!) But this time I made it through in the approved forwards manner, although I slid over rather than next to one of the rocks. I'll get it eventually.
I bumped a few more rocks going through the next bit, right in front of the only other boaters we saw. Sigh. But then we pulled out at a large island for cocktail hour, and all embarrassment was soon forgotten; we put out camp chairs and poured gin and tonics and nibbled on cheese and crackers and grapes and other goodies. The island sits behind the shopping mall on one side of the river and the old road to town on the other, but from where we were it was almost like being in the wilderness.
Then we navigated our way through the rocky shallows for another couple of miles to the takeout - the river's unusually low for this time of year, and it's tricky at this water level - pulled the boats out and piled them on our truck. Another beautiful day on the river!
These photos are actually from Wednesday's run, but they'll give you an idea of what it's like. The first is looking upstream about a half mile after the start, and the second is looking downstream about two and a half miles down.
On Saturday afternoon Britt and I put together the bits of the Animas River we have rafted individually in the past couple of weeks, starting at the 32nd St. put-in (actually a bit upstream of it) and taking out at the new bridge by Home Depot - about 7 miles. This is a little far to do a bicycle shuttle, but we talked our friends Doug and Anne into coming with us in their tandem duckie (inflatable kayak) so we had an actual car shuttle.
It was utterly awesome. The thing about the river through town is that for the first part it doesn't actually go along a road, just along the rec path and through parks, and for the second part it's way below the highway, so it's like - well, not exactly a wilderness experience, but definitely a recreational rather than an urban feel. On our previous trips we'd gone on weekday afternoons and had been surrounded by outfitters' rafts full of tourists, and locals out for a short ride, but maybe the outfitters were having a slow weekend and the locals were all doing other things because we only saw a few other boaters. Mostly people were playing on the banks with their dogs - as Britt said, "Half the people out on the river today are dogs."
We tied up about two miles down the river at Rotary Park where our first ever Pridefest was going full swing and had a beer with some friends (we'd promised one friend, who is the mainstay of the local PFLAG, that we'd show up) and then floated downriver, sobering up in time to go through the biggest set of rapids on this run. The first time I did this section was last Wednesday, and Smelter Rapid knocked me sideways and turned me around so I went through Corner Pocket Rapid backwards. Oops? (At least I didn't fall out or flip!) But this time I made it through in the approved forwards manner, although I slid over rather than next to one of the rocks. I'll get it eventually.
I bumped a few more rocks going through the next bit, right in front of the only other boaters we saw. Sigh. But then we pulled out at a large island for cocktail hour, and all embarrassment was soon forgotten; we put out camp chairs and poured gin and tonics and nibbled on cheese and crackers and grapes and other goodies. The island sits behind the shopping mall on one side of the river and the old road to town on the other, but from where we were it was almost like being in the wilderness.
Then we navigated our way through the rocky shallows for another couple of miles to the takeout - the river's unusually low for this time of year, and it's tricky at this water level - pulled the boats out and piled them on our truck. Another beautiful day on the river!
These photos are actually from Wednesday's run, but they'll give you an idea of what it's like. The first is looking upstream about a half mile after the start, and the second is looking downstream about two and a half miles down.
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Date: 2010-06-30 01:12 am (UTC)