What Lies Ahead, We Know Not

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 the ’60s — “One word. Plastics.”) instead of just rubber but, in general, rafts have evolved little. Of course, that one great leap forward, self-bailing floors, was a very significant step and led to the navigability of all sorts of rivers once deemed ‘unraftable’.

One constant seems to be that river running craft are being designed shorter and shorter, whether it is rafts or kayaks. Kayaks, especially, have changed significantly, with the reduction of their keel length. Waves that were once impossible to surf are now within easy grasp of the most wet-behind-the-ears kayaker with the right size boat and with the will to give it a try.

About ten years ago, some were experimenting with an inflated transparent ball that you climbed inside, like a hamster with a wheel, and used it to travel down a river. I think it was called a ‘Bronco’ ball, or something of the sort, and, even though you could float outrageous whitewater, control of the ball was minimal and the possibility of winding up in a hydraulic in perpetuity was high. I never saw them on a Washington river, so I imagine they have lost their cachet as far as whitewater goes.

On the other hand, ‘Creature Craft’ are now all the rage. Interestingly, Creature Craft have many similarities to the homemade monstrosities that used to come out of the Soviet Union. Basically, they are modified and fortified rafts with roll bars, seats and seat belts. Seat belts would normally be anathema to river rafting but, since they are ‘breakaway’ and since you are navigating water that is relentlessly white and churning, being separated from the craft is not an option.

These hybrid river rafting crafts are showing up at put-ins throughout the western United States and they are being launched down rivers that a majority of river guides would not wish to have anything to do with except in their dreams or nightmares. I am certain ‘Creature Craft’, unlike the Bronco Ball (which I seem to recall was hawked on late night television for a while), will continue to capture bold boaters’ imaginations. And so they will become a part of the long anthology of river running.

Where I have my doubts is whether or not they have a commercially viable future. There is no need for them in the usual whitewater tackled by most commercial boaters and how many outfitters want to send fleets of strapped down customers on incessant Class V-VI waters?

However, like Powell’s fellow intrepid adventurers, when it comes to the future of river running, “what lies ahead, we know not.”

Project RAFT

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 Nantahala Outdoor Center. Hundreds of Project RAFT participants, their devoted followers, NOC staff and interested observers converged on Bryson City, NC, for a week long event intended to bring people together and inspire peace. Even though, by this time, the Soviet Union had splintered, there was still a need to show that there was no ill will between worldwide members of the boating community and that cooperation and face-to-face contact between our culture and theirs trumped all other means of diplomacy.

Project RAFT was also determined to set a standard for environmental stewardship and use the whitewater games as a platform to instill an awareness that free-flowing rivers were still an endangered ‘species’. At Nantahala, teams were encouraged to bring samples of endangered free-flowing rivers from their country for a ceremony of the intermingling of waters. The ceremony was an excellent way to call attention to rivers many of us had never known.

Project RAFT continued into the mid-90s. The next event was in Costa Rica, the last one was held in Turkey. The beauty of the concept was that it fostered a spirit of cooperation and camaraderie between teams from all over the world even as we were competing in the various competitions — slalom, grand slalom, river orienteering, river rescue, triathlons.

Evenings we shared common meals, bonfires and stories before retiring to our tents. At least once during every competition/festival the hundreds of participants would rendezvous at the put-in of a selected river and we would randomly clamber into rafts and spend the next couple of hours sharing the river, if unable to share meaningful communication due to language barriers.

In any event, 2009 marks — approximately — the twentieth anniversary of a concept that, sadly, is not still taking place. It was difficult and costly and a pain to put together, manage and facilitate, but, I suspect, the events continue to resonate with those who came to take part. I know I have dozens of fond memories and quite a few humorous tales about the three events put on by Project RAFT that I and several other Orion river guides attended. But those tales are for another blogging.

The Story of Orion – Part 4

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 to observe the irony in these things.

In any case. . . change.

I landed in Bellingham and enrolled at Western for my third institution of higher learning in the same number of years. I expected my friend from Prescott, Bob Ratcliffe, to also be enrolled, but I learned belatedly from his (former, but unbeknownst to her) girlfriend, Marcy, that he had taken one of life’s little detours. She had no clear idea what his plans were but he hadn’t enrolled at Evergreen State either, which had been his first option. It must have caught her by surprise, as much as it had thrown me for a loop, because, within a quarter, she recollected her backpack and returned to Colorado.

I remained at Western on my own. I imagined Western, being a state college, would be filled to overflowing with local yokels. Hundreds of in-state students who hadn’t been accepted at the larger universities. Students whose grade points were not worth getting worked up over. Community college graduates climbing the academic ladder.

Imagine my surprise when the first dozen people I met were from out-of-state. And then the next two dozen people I met were from out-of-state. There were so many of us we formed our own little clique. I encountered Washingtonians who reinforced my stereotypical image and many who shattered it, but the cadre of folks I hung with were predominantly transplants.

I clearly remember the day I remarked to a table of new friends at a Fairhaven District teahouse that “I wouldn’t be surprised to look up one day and it will be six years later and I will still be in Washington.” It seemed incredible to be imagining such a long span of time in such a strange land. My comment was spoken after my first quarter of homesickness because I also remember re-packing my Pinto for Christmas break fully intending to return forever to the Lone Star State.

However, a sudden relationship with an erudite, environmentally sensitive blond sprite from Ohio brought me back to Bellingham. I say ‘sudden’ because it unfolded and sprung to life only a week before I packed to head home. We had been ‘study hall’ friends throughout my first fall in the Northwest, but intimacy had not surfaced until the eleventh hour. Our relationship didn’t survive the summer of 1977, but it served as the bridge between Texas and Washington that helped me to leave behind the past and begin to concentrate on my very own future.

Talk about a simple twist of fate. I have no idea what path I would be traveling if I had returned to Texas. Odds are, however, I would not know anyone in the Northwest that I know today. Once I arrived back in Bellingham I committed myself to the half-baked idea of pursuing a degree combining recreation and counseling.

But first I had to figure out how to survive monetarily. I enrolled in the work-study program and landed a job with Bellingham Parks and Recreation. What I loved most about my job with park maintenance was the carte blanche to drive a city vehicle with impunity — across park grounds, double parking in the roadway, driving the wrong way on a one-way street. In the fall of 1977, I scored a coveted position as a Resident Aide for the Fairhaven complex on the south end of the campus.

The Fairhaven R.A.s convened in early August and determined that the twelve ‘stacks’, or apartment buildings, at Fairhaven would each be given a theme and we would try and match the incoming students to the ‘theme’ of that dorm. I opted for the ‘Outdoor Recreation’ and ‘Environmental’ stacks.

Meanwhile, from the moment I drove back to WWU, I immersed myself in outdoor activities by proposing and leading river trips on the Skagit River through the college’s Outdoor Program. I was amazed at the ease with which I could check rafts out from the Outdoor Program on my flimsy credentials. It would not be inaccurate to say, after my brief apprenticeship on the Colorado River with Prescott, that I ‘cut my teeth’ refining my rafting skills on the mighty, ‘Magic Skagit’.

A spring trip in 1977 was an eye-opener for me. Michael Bellert and Linda Zimmerman, two new friends who recently moved from Chicago, and my high school sweetheart, Jill Jeanes, who had flown to the Northwest for a visit, suffered an icy dunking in the S-Turn when the hysterically historic raft we were paddling, known as a “World Famous”, stood on its hindquarters (if rafts had hindquarters to stand on) and the four of us unceremoniously slid into the frigid, emerald waters. No neoprene in miles, of course. Lots of New Zealand wool, however.

The “World Famous”, of unknown vintage and origin, was equipped with wooden slats for seats, instead of thwarts. To compound the hilarity of its design, the seats were varnished and the front end bulged like a snake in half-swallow. Additionally, the “World Famous” was as substantial as a gas station vending machine condom.

As we dropped into the entry of the S-Turn, and the bow bucked high toward the sky, Linda, Michael, Jill and I all slipped off of the seats like pats of butter on a hot roll. To be fair, the “World Famous” wasn’t meant to be a whitewater raft. But, also to be fair, we were, generally, clueless. When we returned our bedraggled selves to Goodell Creek Campground, we met an outfitter from Alaska who showed us what a real raft was supposed to look like and taught us our first drinking game. He and his wife also introduced us to a blended whiskey we were unfamiliar with. . . the drink of choice on hoary winter nights by gold-addled prospectors and wild-eyed river runners…Yukon Jack.

The Story of Orion – Part 3

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 College, Columbia College in Columbia, Missouri(!!), Jordan College in Minnesota(!!?) and the University of Santa Cruz in California. But, in a sudden schizophrenic direction change, I opted to enroll at the University of Texas’ Honors College — theoretically, a college within a college — 200 undergraduate students selected out of an enrollment of 50,000. But the main attraction for me to attend the University of Texas was the reunion with my high school friends and the proximity of three siblings — my two brothers and a sister.

Though I was enrolled in the Honors College for Liberal Arts, all that I remember from the entirety of those two semesters, was playing intramural sports. My brothers and I, along with my high school buddies, organized teams for everything — football, coed football, basketball, coed basketball, soccer, softball, volleyball, badminton and racquetball. Looking back, I have no idea how I found time to study. Perhaps I didn’t. I mean, we played sports and organized pickup games, even when we were not involved in our intramural games.

But the ‘outdoor bug’ had bit me. The trouble was that Texas didn’t feel like it had an ‘outdoors’.

There was, however, one notable exception.

It was during my University of Texas stint when my brother-in-law, Ed, hired a kayaking instructor who guided Ed, my brother, Mike, my father and I on a three-day whitewater kayaking trip on the Guadalupe River outside of Austin, Texas. He tried futilely to teach us to kayak from scratch. Teaching a mule to bake cornbread from scratch would have been easier. At least, the mule would have been less stubborn and would surely have bellyached less.

I think you can describe our experience as ‘fun’, but we spent most of our time swimming to shore with kayak in tow, or refusing to make any maneuver that might jeopardize our upright, above water, natural air-breathing position. I distinctly remember being exhausted from doing the one-armed crawl-stroke in my stone-washed denims.

None of us reminisce about our kayaking adventure, without recalling our physical exhaustion, Mike’s ability to avoid turning over (which either stemmed from his low center of gravity or a well-honed sense of survival) and our incredulity that Dad managed to clamber out of his sleeping bag on that first morning following a day of ingesting water and dragging his ass back to shore. But, clamber he did. And he kayaked with us two out of the three days. On the third morning he wised up and ran the shuttle.

Afterward, I invested a fair amount of time perfecting my roll in a swimming pool, but it was a few years before I ventured onto moving water in a kayak again. Of course, for a Texas boy, the ice baths of the rivers in the Northwest were never as enticing as the bath tub water of the Southwest.

The whole time in Texas I dreamed and schemed of returning to the West. I imagined a program and a university degree entitled ‘Wilderness Education and Counseling Psychology’. I had visions of a life of therapeutic outdoor recreation. In fact, Boston College offered a program along those lines, but Massachusetts was a long way from my ideal setting.

My Dad rode to the rescue again. An old friend of his was the Dean of Recreation at San Francisco State. Dad suggested I pick his brain in regards to wilderness recreation programs in the West. I phoned him and got his list of recommendations.

San Francisco State topped his list, of course, but he also plugged the University of Oregon and Western Washington State College. My best friend from Prescott, Bob Ratcliffe, tried steering me toward Evergreen State College in Olympia where we could create our own program and wouldn’t have to deal with grades and a traditional education.

I met Bob during my wilderness orientation and admired his outdoor savvy which was light-years beyond mine, but I was impatient to be finished with public schooling. The small taste of freedom that accompanied the unexpected turn-of-events at Prescott primed me to get on with joining the ‘workforce’. The thought of attending a school, which required critical thinking in order to emerge with a degree, seemed overwhelming and daunting. I wanted a ticket out of school.

In the end, I selected Western because the Recreation program included an emphasis on outdoor recreation, their classes were bunched together in what they called ‘phases’ — similar to Prescott’s intensive one or two subjects at a time in month-long ‘blocks’ — the campus was lovely with red brick paths and towering evergreens and, as a bonus, the wilderness reaches of western Canada were a mere hop, skip and a jump away.

I toiled through the scalding hot and blistering dry Dallas summer laboring as a nursery worker unloading semi-truck loads of fresh, chlorophyll-laden plants imported from British Columbia. Each time I climbed on board to start the unloading process, I would take a deep breath and the lure of the verdant Northwest grew more and more irresistible.

It was September of 1976. With just a week to go before classes were in session, I packed every possession possible into my 1972 pastel-blue Ford Pinto, the interior crammed full except for the driver’s seat, and set out on the interstate for one of the farthest corners of the lower 48 states — a sleepy little burg at the end of the interstate called Bellingham.

The Story of Orion – Part 2

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, none of them grew moldy or had to be discarded.

We had three rafts and they were all paddled. The rafts were stuffed with thirteen people’s worth of gear. Two people shared one blag for their sleeping bags, ensolite foam pads, extra clothes and a second set of shoes which were, typically, boots for hiking. We carried no coolers. We had no tents. Our aluminum-framed backpacks were strapped to the rafts separately in one large awkward bundle.

As we paddled the silver-painted glorified military assault rafts, we sat amongst our gear which was spread throughout the raft from the bow to the stern. You may imagine that I learned knots from rigging gear every day, but until we reached the seventeen miles of whitewater below the confluence of the Green and the Colorado, we relied on gravity. The only knot I could tie in 1974, before the wilderness orientation and after the wilderness orientation, was the one I used to tie my shoelaces.

(And, everyone who watches me tie my shoes laughs because I do something back-asswards, but I can’t tell you today what it is. My mother taught me that bow-tie and I have no intention of relearning a more efficient method five decades hence.)

Two of the rafts we paddled were 15 feet long with large diameter tubes. The 15 foot model with the upturned snout was called a ‘Yampa’ after the Yampa River in northwestern Colorado. The smaller 13 footer was named for the Selway River in Idaho. Ironically, I have never paddled either of those rivers.

The rafts had been christened with names as well. The Selway was named ‘Guacamole’, perhaps because it was the craft most likely to be turned to mush in the whitewater of Cataract Canyon. The two Yampas were named ‘Merlin’ (I always presumed for the magician, but it might also have referred to the town near the Rogue River) and ‘Orion’, the company’s namesake raft and constellation.

Other than hiking and backpacking and eating ‘cardboard-flavored’ meals, the only other organized activity I remember — not including the three-day solo at journey’s end — was a rapell from a one hundred foot sandstone cliff somewhere in the bowels of The Maze. Somehow I was selected to go first. As I nervously hung over the cliff’s edge, my mind waging a battle between fear and humiliation, I remember Len Barron, the sociology professor who had accompanied our trip, leaning over the precipice and say in his East Coast accent through his brushy gray mustache, “You know, James, it’s perfectly permissible to smile.”

Len would later say during the campfire evaluations that I should consider breaking the mold, dare to go out on a limb, commit to doing something out of the ordinary. I was not a risk-taker, and it was obvious. If I played my cards at all, I always played them close to the vest. Len challenged me to think outside of the box I created for myself.

(Of course, he also told one of the slightly uptight female students that she should get herself laid. Len’s candor and generalizing repelled most Prescott students. Indeed, only a couple of us selected him as an advisor.)

I ramble about the Prescott wilderness orientation because it was during that period I realized there was something about being outdoors with a group of people that energized and inspired me. I sat down in the mouth of Dark Canyon at the beginning of those seventy-two hours knowing I valued family and community, but I don’t think I understood or fully appreciated the extent I valued them because I had never been forced to confront my values and to mull them over endlessly.

My time in slickrock country during the fall of 1974 did not seal my career path. I did not receive an epiphany that said, “Go forth and found an adventure travel company and you will be forever satisfied with your existence”. The whitewater of Cataract Canyon was sufficiently exhilarating but it did not convert me into a whitewater junkie. I did not pursue rafting or kayaking or hiking or rock-climbing immediately after my wilderness immersion.

What I learned in my wilderness sojourn with Prescott College was the value of community and a method by which communities can be formed, strengthened, reinvigorated and grown. Up until that time I had blithely wandered through my life cherishing my friendships, my family and viewing from afar my father and mother growing church communities throughout Texas, but not fully appreciating that I needed to maintain contact with the process of community-building or I would wither away.

This wasn’t fully clear at the end of my wilderness orientation either, but it was beginning to be a niggling irritant in the back of my mind. The sort of irritant that might just blossom into a pearl if given sufficient time.

Flood Stage

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 and I have seen rapids reconfigured.

On the Wenatchee River near Leavenworth, a stand alone hydraulic known as Snapdragon was once a prime play spot for rafts and kayaks. It was at the head of an eddy an eighth of a mile downstream of Drunkard’s Drop. It was an incredibly powerful souse hole located right beside this remarkably strong eddy fence. One summer it was there, the next summer it was gone and it has never returned. In fact, at this point it is hard to imagine there was ever a water feature there it is so damn tame and flat.

Granny’s Rapids has migrated south over the years, but dramatically after a couple of 100 year floods. For one thing, the rapid used to be ‘straighter’. Suffocator wasn’t always a ‘keeper’ of unmanned boats (Maravias anyway. . . ). And the monstrous maw on river left in Granny’s, which I think is referred to as the ‘Granny’s Wave’, did not exist a decade ago. And, in my mind, the K2 and Annapurna waves were once bigger and more peaked.

On the Skykomish River, Boulder Drop, which consists of boulders of all sizes, but a few as big as barns, has not changed much over my whitewater lifespan, but one place in that run has been altered for sure — The Ledge Wave. It seems to have become deeper and more fearsome and, at certain water levels, your odds of breaking through that trough of hard whitewater are slim to none. In the past, it was simpler to punch through it, and simpler to avoid it.

After the floods of the past few days, I suspect we are going to see some new features in some of our rivers. My hope is that the recent flush has scoured the Sauk of all that deposited silt. And perhaps, the rapid Popeye will have been returned to it glory days.

Eddying Out

Sauk River Update
The word from the Darrington District is good in terms of the bridge over the Whitechuck River 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 promotion. I am concerned however that, eventually, they are going to lead to some difficult situations, especially in reference to their commercial use.

If you are unfamiliar with these new “rafts”, they are self-righting rafts with rollbars where you strap yourself into the passenger seats. I have only seen videos with two people paddling, but I understand there are models capable of handling 6 paddlers. Apparently, in order to be sure they ‘right’ themselves, the paddlers need to do some kind hip snap, not unlike what you do in a kayak, though I am certain it is not nearly as problematical, or complicated or as difficult to learn. In the videos I have seen, these craft are running incredible stretches of whitewater safely, though, again, not without some drama. For instance, several times I have seen the craft on their sides for harrowing moments. Which would mean, of course, someone is below surface strapped to the boat.

The other concern is that it would presumably be possible to have your ‘seatbelt’ fail in the midst of Class V+ whitewater not meant to be navigated by paddlers sans boats. Tumwater Canyon, for example. I understand outfitters are salivating over the notion that — finally — the whitewater of Tumwater could now be viable with guests in Creature Craft. I would suggest these outfitters consider long and hard the consequences of opening this non-profit, Pandora’s Box of a whitewater safety nightmare. It is not worth it. The money is not there in abundance and there is really no need for the liability exposure.

The lure of fame, if not fortune, will be irresistible. The lunacy of running Tumwater with neophytes at higher water levels will, sooner or later, be tried. You can count on me to stay on the sidelines.

Orion Guide Training and River Rescue Course Pushed Back

Due to a fantastic opportunity to raft the Grand Canyon for the 12th time with an amazing party of long-time friends, Orion’s guide training and river rescue course has been rescheduled from late March to late April. The course will run one weekend shorter but, otherwise, will be the usual high quality and excellent times as always.

It is also likely that a second guide training will run in the latter half of May.

So, for those of you who have put off doing Guide Training with the excuse that the weather was too daunting, 2009 is your year. Better weather is almost guaranteed with a start that is a month later.