First Day in Idaho

We arrived in Meridian (a suburb of Boise, excellent!) on Friday at about 5:00pm, Hart and Jory were there to welcome us to our new temporary home. Shortly thereafter, Hart asked me if I wanted to join him and a group of old college friends for a rafting trip Saturday morning. It had been a long day and I was feeling a bit of a cold coming on, but I still thought it sounded like fun. The next morning we left at about 8:30am and ran out of gas about five minutes later (fortunately it was at an intersection with a gas station on the corner). We filled up and were back on the road to McCall and the Payette River. We joined up with a bunch of people and divided up between three rafts. We headed out on the river and the weather was beautiful!

Now, I've got some pretty good river running experience under my belt--the Colorado (2-3x), the Snake (3x), and tubing the Provo, so I thought this Payette River would be a cake-walk. But I was in for a surprise. There were loads of rapids, some pretty mild, but others pretty gnarly. Speaking of gnarly, one of the early rapids is known as "Go Left..." Usually that name is followed by "...or die" or something of the sort. Anyway, we hit it just right (for a good ride that is) and I got pulled right over the side and dumped in the drink. That was a scary ride. Because I had a life jacket on I wasn't immediately worried about drowning, but was worried about the rocks. So I tried to turn myself around so my feet were facing downstream when I realized I couldn't breath. It wasn't that I was underwater but that I kept having bucket after bucket of whitewater dumped on my bobbing head. So then I was trying to both keep my head where I could breath and keep my feet downstream, but none of it did much good as the water was so strong I was just getting pushed and rolled wherever it wanted me. I got dragged over several big rocks like sack of Idaho potatoes, but fortunately didn't bang into any of them with acute force. It seemed like the rapid went on forever. I didn't get back into the boat for about two minutes, which when you're being tumbled down a roaring river, it seems like a lot longer.

Of our group, each raft lost at least one, with five total going into the drink at that spot. Hart had told me that I was coming to fill the slot left open by Jory who refused to come. Apparently, he had taken her down that run a couple of years ago in kayaks and she had been dumped in that boiler too. She had also gotten dumped off three more times subsequently and ended up abandoning her kayak and hiking up to the road to hitchhike back to the car. Anyway, after surviving that rapid I could sympathize.

We climbed down on our ride back to take a video of the rapid. We were about 20 feet from the river, so it doesn't look very big. But if you look closely at the extreme right of the video you can see one or two people right down by the water to give you a sense of scale. In any case, if you were to put an average size ant on the screen when watching the video it would be about the scale size of a person in the river. Enjoy!



One more thing. There were a bunch of kids on the trip with us. We had three little girls on our raft, two with their dads and one by herself. They would scream like crazy when we went over the rapids. Then during the slow parts, they would try to push their dads, and us, into the drink. One of the girls, probably the most innocent and harmless looking of the three, was a real trouble maker. We paddled over to the raft where her mom was and helped her climb over for a visit. Next thing we knew we heard screaming and splashing and this little girl, probably not more than five years old, had pushed her mom and another dad who had been holding his son on his lap, into the river. She was standing there, surrounded by shocked faces, with a beaming smile on her face. It was hilarious! Needless to say, she got tossed overboard pretty quickly after that, but she was smiling all the way.