River Rafting in Washington

The call came in the dead of winter.  It was a Seattle winter; therefore, instead of layers of snow blanketing the ground, or biting Arctic air knifing through your thickest, down jacket, there was a dismal grey light coming through the window and the streets glistened with rain.  Any phone call was a welcome distraction. His voice sounded young, his questions were many and he spoke in the laconic parlance of surfers.  Or, in his case, a snowboarder. He wanted to know about rafting and, specifically, guide training.  He hailed from Baltimore and was working his way westward.  That winter, he was a “liftie” at Schweitzer in the panhandle of Idaho.  A Democratic governor with a penchant for Krispy Kreme donuts and blue dresses had just been elected president and - frankly - anything seemed likely.   Even so, I was dubious.   A snowboard punk thousands of miles from home, unfamiliar with the Northwest, expecting to land in Seattle...

Leavenworth, Washington I first set foot on an inflatable raft in the '70s.  It was a product of military surplus, but designed specifically for white water rafting .  The bow was upturned to deflect and plow through waves, the fabric was neoprene reinforced by fabric and there were multiple chambers.  Built by Rubber Crafters in West Virginia, it was one of the best river running crafts being manufactured. Forty years later, we have inflatable rafts that are lighter and even more durable, self-bailing floors, urethane coating embedded with abrasive substances for better grip, foot cups, rafts that have uplifted kicks in the bow and the stern - basically - all sorts of technological and design advances.  Catarafts, 'Creature' crafts and smaller, more maneuverable rafts are exploring and challenging white water rapids, and stretches of river, unimaginable twenty years ago.  What's "possible" is getting extended every season. Life jackets are b...

Less than an hour from downtown Seattle, undammed waters coursing off Glacier Peak and the surrounding wilderness, merge to form a river federally protected under the Wild & Scenic Rivers Act --- the Sauk River .  In the morning, you could have an Americano at the original Starbucks and stroll Pike Place Market dodging flying fish and you could still make your launch time for this ten-mile dash through Washington's verdant back country. White rafts waiting for their good guides. . . Between Whitechuck River and the struggling logging community of Darrington, the Sauk cascades between boulders worn smooth and round, and a forest draped with delicate, light-green club moss and carpeted with mosses in dozens of shapes and shades of green.  The white water rafting is superb with active and challenging rapids that demand a guide's attention.  Even the name's grab the guide's attention:  Guide Trap, Alligator Hole, Jaws and Waterslide, and more tha...

Above: Grace Peven rowing on the Grande Ronde River (circa 2002) with brother, Ben, behind. Story By: Grace Peven I recently underwent training to become a certified river rat. Not a rodent with a long snout and a sparsely haired tail that lives near the water, but a rafting guide .  In mid-April, twenty students, and twenty well-experienced guides and instructors embarked on a week of intensive training on Oregon’s Deschutes River .    My romantic aspirations of conquering mighty currents and rapids are rooted in a childhood full of river adventures. My mom and my dad met through rafting, became guides, and eventually passed on the rafting gene to me.  I’m eternally grateful to my parents for raising me on the sandy beaches and serene waters of the Salmon River.  Many years of rafting with close friends and family inspired an ambition to carry on the family legacy of guiding.  This led me to start work at Orion Rafting w...

Leavenworth, Washington Orion River Rafting just completed 2012's annual river guide training .  Twenty intrepid individuals signed on to take this year's course.  We had nurses, EMTs, firefighters, IT types, parks and recreation administrators, small business owners, and college and high school students.  The usual gamut of personalities, occupations and attitudes. Some were fast learners blessed with a natural proclivity to wield a guide paddle and a laser sharp attentiveness to details.  Some needed more time to absorb the lessons.  For them, repetition was the key to learning.  But the longer I do this (this was my 34th season of training new guides), the more I realize how much better prepared these new river rafting guides are as compared to the founding days of river rafting in Washington state . River rafting guides in the twenty-first century are benefiting from several decades of accumulative experience and passed on knowledge....

Leavenworth, Washington Convenience is over-rated.  For instance, do people really need the convenience of drive-through liquor stores, and what subliminal message does that send? I understand the attraction of doing everything online.  I know I don't always want to have a long, drawn-out conversation with a stranger.  For instance, when I am shopping in a brick-and-mortar store, I want to be left to my own devices until I determine I have a question to ask.  In my opinion, most salespeople tend to 'badger' their customers.  I'd rather wander around aimlessly until I am ready to be assisted (which may not ever happen). But some purchases, like a river rafting journey , more often than not, require further information.  Users of our service need details and particulars.  They need to know what the river classifications mean or indicate.  They need to know what they are getting for the price they are paying.  They need to know...

Leavenworth, Washington What should we expect for Washington rivers and river rafting ? Sunny on the east side of the Cascades, soggy on the west.  That is what is always expected out of rivers located within an easy drive of Seattle. Wenatchee River - Drunkard's Drop Sunshine on the eastern slopes, and moist marine air backed up from the passes to the sound on the west side.  Spring is in full bloom on both sides of the mountain divide and our healthy snow pack continues to settle amidst the vales and forests deep in the heart of the North Cascades. In other words, the spring melt off is still to come. Temperatures will be rising over the next few days, touching the 80s in Leavenworth and, it is possible, the white water game will be on.  Last season, turbulent and cold spring conditions persisted right into and throughout June, and the snow melt never built to a crescendo.  River water levels - on both sides of the mountains - were sustained...

Leavenworth, Washington Henry Ford was quoted as saying, "Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success."  Managers, work-group supervisors and corporate leaders may want to consider looking outside of the box for tools and ideas that motivate and bring groups together.  Orion River Rafting believes they need look no further than their closest Washington river outfitter.  Our guides become guides beneath the banner of teamwork and know how to provide a quality river trip that will bring out the best in your group and get them working as a team. River rafting is not all flailing paddles and great big splashes. White water rafting trips, once again, are becoming a popular way for corporate groups to bond and grow together. Co-workers unite in powerful ways on a whitewater trip because - by necessity - they are working together to challenge the forces of nature. There are few things more exhilarating than spend...

When I first 'cut my teeth' river rafting , my instructors talked about a collection of 'river gods'.  They were not referring to the bold whitewater enthusiasts who were starting to push the boundaries of river rafting all over the planet while claiming first descents, though many thought of those daring adventurers as 'river gods'.  It was their way of introducing the green river runners in our party to their version of the mythological pantheon of 'river gods' that they claimed were part and parcel of a free-flowing river. With white water rafting - when in doubt, scout! I will not bother you with the names of these gods, but I will divulge that they were 'tongue-in-cheek' monikers.  Sort of inside jokes, in the Southwestern river community where I was taught to guide .  But they stood for something else altogether - Respect. Respect for the immense, unknowable, ultimately untameable power of moving water. Respect lik...

Today's Seattle Times included an article in the Northwest Travel section from an author voluntarily seeking refuge from the digitally connected world many of us have created for ourselves. Our addiction to video display terminals is real, and like alcohol, nicotine and high fructose syrup, it needs to be moderated. Or, as mom liked to say, we "are cruising for a bruising." I am as guilty as anyone in our brave new electronic world of being enthralled by all of my digital devices. I have a desktop computer, a laptop and an iPhone. I am not going to count the desktops languishing in my basement. Recently, I came up with a rationalization to purchase an iPad, but, so far, I have refrained from opening my wallet. I utilize all of these devices every day. The newspaper continues to be delivered by a 'paperboy' (actually a middle-aged guy in a Mazda) but, I have to admit, with each passing day, newspaper delivery and newspaper reading is feeling more and mor...

When John Wesley Powell launched his stolid but, ultimately, fragile boats down the unknown of the Colorado River system in the late 1800's. The title was a common refrain amongst his hardy adventurers. The same phrase could be muttered about the future of river rafting . In the few decades I have been floating rivers , inflatable rafts have not changed substantially from the military-issue models that I rafted the Green and Colorado Rivers with Prescott College in 1974. The military gave you the option of black, black or black. Self-bailing models arrived in the late '80s and our Project RAFT Orion team was sponsored by Maravia to the use of a hot-pink Williwaw I during the competitive events at Nantahala Outdoor Center. Inflatable manufacturers have experimented with boat designs --- diminishing bow and sterns rather than symmetrical or asymmetrical, building boats with internal bladders as AIRE does and making rafts out of polymers (the movie The Graduate warned us in...

Before the collapse of the Soviet Union and the crumbling of the Berlin Wall, a group of American boaters ventured into the wilds of Siberia and discovered Soviet citizens, using home-made rafts, launching themselves down torrents of whitewater that would give the boldest river rafters pause. Late in the '80s, a reconstituted group of the same American rafting enthusiasts returned to the Soviet Union to compete in the whitewater competitions that Soviet clubs organized. Out of these encounters emerged the idea for a non-profit dubbed Project RAFT which stood for Russians and Americans for Teamwork. The idea was to bring teams of Soviets together with teams of Americans for a semi-annual whitewater river rafting competition and environmental festival. It was fleshed out to include teams from any nation in the world capable of fielding a river rafting team of 6 to 7 individuals. The first official Project RAFT gathering happened early in the spring of 1990 and was hosted by the Na...

Change. I am uncomfortable with change. I wear the same clothes day after day, haunt the same haunts, perform the same routine over and over. Amongst the instructors, during guide training, the common refrain goes, ". . . but, we always do it that way!" And yet, between 1974 and 1976, I careened from one of the smallest colleges in the universe, to one of the largest universities ever built, to a state college in the farthest reaches of the continental United States. In suburban north Dallas, my life was so free of change I attended elementary through high school without ever leaving one street! Arapaho was the name of the residential street where Arapaho Elementary, West Junior High and Richardson High School were located one after the other like some sort of meat processing facility or car manufacturing assembly line. Arapahos were nomadic Plains Indians who never set foot in north Texas. I was a sedentary suburbanite who had hardly set foot outside of Texas. I love...

Sometime during my first collegiate year, Prescott College, mired in financial hot water, lost its academic accreditation. Significantly, the staff of twenty-four professors, despite being booted off their remote, wilderness-like campus, and in spite of a loss of accreditation, chose to conduct their seminars and classes right out of their homes. I returned to Prescott after Christmas break, and though I admired the professors’ temerity, I did not return to take classes. I couldn't see spending perfectly good money on an education that wouldn't transfer to any other university program. I spent the winter and spring of 1975 umpiring volleyball games, trying to commit suicide by instructing myself in skiing techniques like negotiating moguls (the knee-pounding humps, not the rich fat cats), and hiking in the Grand Canyon with my Prescott College friends. I researched alternative colleges throughout the Midwest and West --- Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio(!), Colorado ...

Thirty days in the redrock country of Utah did not make me an outdoorsman. (Thirty five years hasn’t molded me into one either, for that matter.) In all honesty, I don’t recall learning very many ‘outdoor skills’. No survival skills, no map and compass skills, no river rescue skills. Since a majority of the river trip was a float trip, we barely learned how to steer the rafts. It was a thirty day wilderness orientation trip with minimal structure. I remember a fair amount of hiking, as well as backpacking. We ate an enormous amount of peanut butter and jam on round crackers called ‘Bolton biscuits’ which was just one of the indestructible foods that we hauled down river in used military black bags referred to as ‘blags’. We also ate an enormous amount of tasteless granola and freeze dried dinners. We brought 5 pound bricks of cheese that we kept unrefrigerated for the entire time. The cheese blocks grew sweaty and greasy in the unremitting heat of the desert, but, remarkably,...

Every winter --- at some point during the winter --- Washington's Cascades get slammed by the Pineapple Express erasing weeks or months of accumulated snow and creating havoc in the lowlands. At present, we have floodwaters barricading I-5 south of Centralia, landslides blocking Blewett Pass and avalanches threatening every east-west route across the Cascades. Of course, all of the Cascade rivers are at flood stage though, by now, they have peaked and are receding. These periodic winter floods sometimes wreak havoc with the rapids we guide commercially. I wrote earlier about the aftermath of the huge Sauk River blowout (~100,000cfs) which not only blew out the access bridge over the Whitechuck River which once led to the Sauk's put-in, it 'silted in' a every major rapid on the wild and scenic river. Over the three decades I have been rafting Washington's whitewater, I have seen rapids get created by floodwaters, I have seen rapids get eliminated by high water a...

Sauk River Update The word from the Darrington District is good in terms of the bridge over the Whitechuck Rive r leading to the Sauk River 's old put-in. No longer will have to risk life and limb parking along the Mountain Loop highway to stage river trips on the Sauk . I have no idea if the put-in has been restored as well, but, at the least, we will be able to hump the boats over the streamside boulders just downstream of the Whitechuck to access the Sauk. Hopefully, the Darrington Ranger District has plans to replace the porta-pottis as well. Now we need for the Sauk River to regain its old disposition and nature of technical, boulder-strewn rapids with fun sets of challenging waves and hydraulics --- AND --- be navigable below 3,000 cfs at the Sauk, near Sauk, river gauge. Then, and only then, will the Sauk be back to 'normal'. Creature Craft I am not going to link to these latest and greatest water craft because I don't think they need any additional promotio...