White Water Rafting Trip; Rapids, Beavers, Bears and Waterfalls

@mickeybeaves and I finally got to do something we had been wanting to do since we started traveling full time about a year and a half ago: white water rafting! We got to the river rafting location a little before noon, filled out our paper work and waited for lunch to be served at 12:30, we worried that they wouldn’t have food for us pescatarians but they had some veggie chili that was enough to sustain us through the day. After lunch we geared up in our wetsuits, wet suit jackets, life jacket, helmet, wet suit socks and water shoes and jumped on the bus with our paddles and the rafts on a trailer connected to the bus. They drove us up river about 15 minutes and dropped us of at a entry point where we were given a safety talk divided into two rafts and whisked down river.

The first set of rapids where not too intense and kinda prepared you for the rest of the river, suddenly they had us pull our rafts over to the side of the river bank and everyone exited the rafts, they told us we were headed to see a waterfall that was only excessable by boat. As we hiked down a very narrowly maintained path we came to a stop as we spotted a beaver! Cody and I had been hoping to spot a beaver as beaver holds a special meaning to my soon to be husband, and here one was in the wild we walked by several dams and spotted the beavers home before we came upon another beaver swimming in a small body of water. It was quite magical, as we kept walking through the forest we bagan to notice long and deep claw marks on nearby trees, where a bear had obviously been climbing, I was glad we got to see the evidence of the bear and not the actual bear up close.

We finally made it to one of the coolest waterfalls Cody and I have seen, there was a path to walk through the waterfall so Cody and I couldn’t resist, it was a golden opportunity with wearing a wetsuit and how cold the waters were, the only way we could bare the cold was layered in wetsuits like we were.

After we all got the chance to go through the waterfall, we headed back to the rafts to continue down the river and into some of the more extreme rapids. We paddled like a Viking ship, everyone on each side playing their part to keep up faceing the best direction when we hit the rapids to keep us from flipping over, and all under direction and lots of encouragement from our guide, who was at the rear of the raft watching for hazards and showing us the sites, landscapes and landmarks along the way.

When the rapids were the most intense our boat would fold in what they called taco-ing because the raft bent into the shape of a taco, I was on the side that took a lot of the blunt impacts and did start feeling cold toward the end when rapid after rapid washed over me, but none of that detoured Cody nor I from going up with the second group to do the “extreme” rapids.

After our short and less extreme than expected extreme ride we ended back at the camp at about 5:30 where we shed all our gear and Cody and I took to their sauna to warm up! It was quite an experience and one Cody and I look forward to doing more often, you could definitely say we are hooked on white water rafting!