Lower Salmon August 2012

 

Lower Salmon to the Confluence of the Snake. 

 

We decided we could make our own reality TV show called the "Ducky Wars."

Oh love love love 







Justin keeping Josie on track while she was on the oars.
Scott brought an extra boat so Josie and the kids could get oaring experience.  We kept it light and they had a blast on it.   Nothing happens by chance, it was meant to be that we had an extra boat  (this is foreshadowing).


Paige made a new best friend for the week.

At home behind the oars.

Derigged at the confluce.  Waiting for the jet boat.

 

 

 

 

 

 Side surfing at Kelly's Whitewater park in Cascade.  It's a tradition to stop here on our way to the put in for the Lower Main.

Paige making sure Max gest to the shore.  She is such a good kid. 



If more girls did more of this, the world would be a better place:)



Paige crawled out and made Darren jump first.  We never thought she'd do it, but finally




 

She did!!!





 

So did I, but HOLY CRAP it was scary getting out there!  

 This picture deserves the story....
We are in the tent just waking up and hear rustling nearby.  Pete is waking Justin and Brady, who had slept under the stars just outside our tent.  "Hey, your dad's boat is gone."  I hear this, but don't give it any thought. The night before we had sat around the campfire talking about all the pranks the guys have played on each other over the years on river trips....."No, I'm serious, it's missing,"  Pete is saying.
More rustling.  "Dad, your boat's gone." 
"I thought about that during the night...."  Darren says.  "Justin, run up river and see if they tied it around the corner." 
They have to be messing with us, but I can tell that Darren only half thinks so.
We camped at a huge eddy, but an IK had been tied up to the back of our boat.  Tug, tug, tug all night long and off goes the IK and the boat.
Justin runs up river, nothing.  So he runs down river, scuttles up some rocks, looks long and hard. Nothing.
The reality sets in, the boat has gotten loose.  How long ago?  How far could it have gone?  It is nowhere to be seen around the next corner and all the way down the next canyon. 
I am laughing, Darren is not.  An hour later I am not laughing, I am actually searching my soul to see if there is braveness in there...

In  hurried frenzy Darren and Justin, aka Lewis and Clark, pictured above, set off on a boat finding adventure. Would we see them later that day?  How far could have boat have gone?  Would it be flipped?  We don't tie anything down at night. 

The extra boat.  We have never had an extra boat on a trip. Yay!  For an extra boat. We haven't been loading it with anything heavy, so there is plenty of space for all the gear that would normally have been put on the missing boat - kitchen box, table, tent, all our dry bags, water, etc. 
Happy about the extra boat so I can get our stuff down the river without having to somehow fit all of that on the other already burdened boats. But...

Justin is the only one who didn't hook his lifejacket to the boat that night.  He had carefully tucked it down in his kayak.  Darren borrowed Scott's one and only extra lifejacket. That means Brady, Paige, Donna (Darren's 73 yr old mother), and I don't have lifejackets.
  Not too far downriver are the big rapids. Snow Hole. 
Two lifejackets are produced.  Donna and Paige are covered.  I had realized this a while ago.  That for sure I wouldn't have one. Which is fine....except for Snow Hole!
 As I was trying to shove down breakfast I was producing an article for the paper....."Ironman swimmer drowns...." So ironic that it just might happen.  Sorry to be so dramatic, but that is exactly how I was feeling! 

I borrow extra straps from others and Brady and I begin rigging the boat.  I am shaking inside.  I can handle a boat with this much gear on it, but I want it as light as possible becuase of one thing - Snow Hole!! with no life jacket.  Brady also has no lifejacket.  That worries me even more. Snow Hole is a fun rapid, but has a definite hole that gets bigger as the river drops.  The river is extra low.   Snow hole is just shallow and nasty filled with rocks.  So this is the soul searching part.

I am going through the motions of running straps through dry bags and around dry boxes.  Inside I am thinking how really there is no other choice but to just do this.  There is no one else in the group to take this boat.  The boat has to go downriver.  Darren is not here, nor will he be coming back.  I start to get mad at him.  Why didn't we think to leave Justin with me?  I trust him more oaring through the rapids than I trust myself.  I wouldn't be half as nervous without a lifejacket if he were oaring.  But it was up to me.  Somehow I seem to find myself in these situations where I just have to dig in, there really was no other choice. 
So looking back, this all seems so dramaish....but in reality I didn't know when or where we would find the other boat and Darren. This river is really not a big, scary river. But I was responsible to get this boat and Brady through the rapids and neither of us had a lifejacket.
All rigged, we send Paige and Donna to get on other boats.  As we set off Donna says that I should take her lifejacket, that she is old and can die, that I am young.  OH more drama!  NO I am not taking your lifejacket. 
So off we go.  Brady and I oar into the current and just look at each other.  "Well, it's just you and me bud." We talk about how we would handle swimming a rapid without a lifejacket. 

OK enough about not having a lifejacket.  We oar around the corner.  No Darren and boat.  We oar through a long, flat, section of river.  How in the world did the boat get down this?  We come to another corner.....a long canyon, no boat.  Crap.  More slow flat water.  If the boat got through this, it must have gotten loose early in the night and who knows how far it is!
Next corner....waaaay down there, a tiny blue speck.  The boat!   Relief!!!
What took us so long?  Darren and Justin want to know.  They decide they will do this more often,  they didn't have to take down tents, clean up breakfast, load boats.

I will live another day.  :)

Darren will never live down the fact that he didn't tie his boat up good enough.  Darren, of all people.  He is the total go to guy on the river.  Funny thing, everytime since, even on other river, Justin goes over and ties Darren's boat to his own.

 

Table doubles as diving board  I actually did a small stint on my high school diving team.  It's true!  It came naturally because of my gymnastics training.  That was the year I got mono and hurt my wrist... so it was just a short stint.

On the last night we camped right below the confluence on the Salmon and Snake rivers.  Across the river is Oregon.  Oregon was burning.  We watched as this barely crept up over the ridge, and quickly started burning down the mountain toward the river.  We sat in lawn chairs and watched with more intensity than we would the most suspenseful movie at a theatre. The smoke was overwhelming.  We didn't feel in danger.  There was a huge river in between the fire and us.  The jet boat company that was to pick us up the next morning would be aware of the fire and know that we were there.  But Wow!  We saw a bear that was obviously fleeing the fire and had come all the way down to the river.  Darren and the boys slept outside the tent with baby wipes over their mouth and nose.  Sometime in the middle of the night the wind shifted and the fire seemed to stagnate, the smoke went the other direction.

 

Exciting trip to say the least!