Talk about a whirlwind week! After returning from St. Louis there was only a day left in the final exam period so many players were busy taking exams and wrapping up the school year. The period between the end of finals and graduation is nicknamed "Camp Whitman" because the campus is alive with activity but no classes/homework/tests. Just a few days of hanging out with good friends before the summer. I decided to take "Camp Whitman" a step further and took members of both tennis teams on an overnight rafting trip down the Wallowa and Grande Ronde Rivers.
Big thanks to Minam Raft Rentals for providing us the rafts. As usual their service was awesome -- we showed up at their shop Thursday afternoon and the rafts were waiting for us to load. Let me say the Grande Ronde river was running hard which created some issues (more on this later). A couple weeks ago the river was running was at 5.5k CFS (cubic feet per second) but during our trip the river was almost 13k! In fact the towns of Elgin and Troy were experiencing some minor flooding.
We had a great float Thursday. Weather was near 70 and the high water flow created some fun rapids. About 6pm it was time to get off the water and set up camp. With the high water flows it takes some planning and hard rowing to beach a raft. I along with two other rafts managed to pull out at one of the best camp spots in the canyon section. However one raft (ET, Steven, and Jake) wasn't paying attention and overshot the take out. Since there is no going upstream we reloaded and chased the wayward boaters down the river. Once we all grouped up I talked about the importance of proper planning and rowing to get the rafts ashore in the high water. Once again I took the lead to scout for good camp spots. At another wonderful looking spot I and two boats pulled off only to see the ET/Jake/Steven raft miss the take out! Let's just say it took a total of four take out attempts (and a new rower in the ET/Jake/Steven raft) before we managed to get everyone ashore.
Even though our take out was later than originally planned we managed to have a wonderful meal of steak and chicken fajitas, dutch oven rice and a special pot of dutch oven beans. Was quite the evening of cooking -- I had two two-burner stoves and two dutch ovens cooking at the same time!
With the sound of rushing water outside the tents most everyone had a great night sleep (Jake and ET didn't bring sleeping bags so their sleep wasn't so great). Friday was pretty uneventful: two dutch oven breakfast meals, pack up camp, load up rafts and float the final stretch to our final take out.
Certainly a fun way to wrap up the year. Here is a link to pictures from the trip.
No comments:
Post a Comment