The Kasers Go Rafting

Thursday, June 28, 2001 - Oregon is a state of many contrasting environments, climates, geographies, and peoples. Western Oregon tends to be fairly lush and green. Once you climb over the Cascade mountains to the east of the Willamette Valley, you come to the "high desert," a very dry, arid environment. The Deschutes River runs north along much of the eastern side of the Cascades, eventually emptying into the mighty Columbia River that separates Oregon from Washington as it "Roll[s] On, Columbia, Roll[s] On," all the way to the Pacific Ocean. (Song title appropriated from, I believe, a Woody Guthrie song.)

My family (my wife Sharon, our son Shane, and our daughter Megan) joined my sister Donna and her husband Jerry on a trip to Maupin (as in, "We are now Moppin' the floor"), a small dot on the map of the Deschutes River. It's greatest claim to fame is the number of tourists drawn there every summer for white-water rafting. Now, it's not the greatest white-water rafting in the world, but it's great for beginners, and beginners we are (and will, no doubt, always be :-). The country is VERY dry and arid there, except for the beautiful (and extremely cold) Deschutes River. Once you get up away from the river, there's nothing but sagebrush and scattered, over-grazed, dry grasses. We drove north through the Willamette Valley, then east along the Columbia Gorge, then south to Maupin, about five hours.

We stayed at what used to be a bed & breakfast, but which is now just a bed. :-) They have a very nice dining room, though, and the establishment is situated right on the river, with a nice lawn going right down to the river's edge. We had dinner that evening, then went for a drive along the river to view the rapids. They didn't look like much from the road, but I had a hunch they'd be a little different when you were down on the water in a raft.... Then we spent the rest of the evening playing cards.

Friday, June 29, 2001 - We had breakfast in the inn's dining room at about 7:30, then at about 9:15 went to the office to sign release forms and beneficary forms. :-) From there we went around to the lawn by the river where we met our river guides and got our equipment, a PFD and an oar. (They claimed that PFD stood for Personal Floatation Device, but I suspected that was the definition intended for public consumption and that the acronym really stood for something far less agreeable, but the river guides just smiled and stayed mum on the subject.)

Most of the raft trips bus you upriver about 5 miles from Maupin, and then you float back either to Maupin, or points downstream, depending upon the length of your trip. That makes for pretty crowded conditions, so what our folks did was start from right there on their lawn, float downstream, bus us back to the lodge for lunch, then bus us upstream to finish the float back at the lodge. Water/rapids are rated into one of six classes. I don't know the technical definitions, but they go something like this:
CLASS 1: calm moving water (you make all of the waves)
CLASS 2: we've got ripples now. If you're in an inner tube you might have some fun.
CLASS 3: these are becoming a little more fun, especially if you don't know what you're doing, but are still quite safe.
CLASS 4: these become more technically challenging and a certain amount of danger becomes evident.
CLASS 5: very challenging, requires great skill or idiocy, your choice.
CLASS 6: impassible. ie, only an idiot would think of going over it in a barrel.

The stretch of river we were going on had one class 4 rapid (Boxcar), a half-dozen class 3, a bunch of class 2, and long stretches of class 1. :-) We had 9 people in our boat (including our river guide, Colin, a really nice college guy from Bend). There was one other boat that day from the lodge, which had two (related) families from Indiana and Arizona, I believe. There must have been 12 people in their raft, from about 8 years old up to almost 50. We, of course, had to break them in with a little friendly "oar manuevers" (translation: splashing very cold water across the bow of their raft... we usually missed the bow and drenched the poor oarsmen... accidents happen, dontcha know???) Anyway, we successfully negotiated the class 2 and class 3 rapids in the first stretch of the river, and then beached and got out just above Sherar's Falls (a class 6 rapid). The following photo was taken at that point. We were wet, but still brave:

Left-to-right, we have Sailor Shane, Captain Everett, First Mate Sharon, Moral Officer Megan, Admiral Aljets (my brother-in-law Jerry), and Deck Rat Donna (my sister). And no, before you ask, we're not members of a SWAT team, those bright orange things are the before-mentioned PFD's. Stylish, hmmm? The nice green stuff behind us is where the river flows. You can see glimpses of the rest of the landscape. Rattlesnake country.

So, we portaged around the falls, then put in for the second leg of the trip through three more sets of rapids. I took the following picture during that leg of the trip, showing our intrepid explorers at their "action stations."

(The third person back on either side are the couple from Florida.) In the back of the boat is the river guide, Colin, displaying his immense knowledge, experience, and wisdom that instilled such confidence in us. Sharon's first comment on seeing him was, "He's no older than SHANE!" I guess she was expecting someone named Ishmael. Actually, Colin was a really great guy, and actually succeeded in hooking the PFD of the other boat's river guide with the T-grip of his oar and pulled him overboard into the water. Our guide was the bestest.

So, we finished the second leg of the trip, then headed on the bus back to the lodge where we had a nice little lunch before boarding the bus again for the final trip (I hesitated to think of it that way at the time...) up river for the third leg of the adventure. The couple from Florida had only signed up for the first two legs of the trip, so the final leg was just us and Colin the River Dog...er...Guide. The third leg turned out to have the best rapid of the day. First we encountered Wapinitia, a class 3 rapid, where the rafting company took this picture of us (not really showing the rapid much):

After that, it was a short float to the only class 4 rapid that we went through, Boxcar (called such, I suppose, because of the VERY large rocks sitting along the side of and in the river, rocks the size of... wait for it.... a boxcar!) As we were approaching it, Colin asked us how we'd like to go through the rapid. We replied that we preferred to be in the boat. He said no, do you want to take it the "safe" way, or "head on?" Well, Shane and I and Donna, of course, immediately replied "head on!" This was what we'd paid our money for!!! But Colin said, "That's great. But I should tell you that sometimes, not often, but SOMETIMES, the boat can flip." We were undaunted. He then went on to say, "It's very unlikely that the boat will flip, but it is quite common for one person to fall out of the boat, and it's the person in the front-left of the raft." Now, if you look at the above picture, you may notice who was sitting in the front-left (me). Well, I thought, "This is great! I'm REALLY going to get my money's worth!!!" We said, "Let's go!" Hence:

Here we are, just entering the rapid. You can see a "hole" in the water right in front of the raft. The raft is about to bounce off of the back wall of that hole, dropping the front-left corner of the raft right down into that hole. For one split-moment I was looking over the front-left corner of the raft into a hole in the water that seemed about 10 feet down (but couldn't have been more than 3), and I and the raft were falling right for it. Having been forewarned, I was braced and started pushing myself back away from the edge of the raft. About then, my corner of the raft "hit bottom" (the water at the bottom of the hole, or dip in the water), and the entire raft was engulfed by a wave of water, knocking Shane back into the boat and pretty well washing everyone around. Hence:

I'm the guy with the tan cap on his head, Shane is buried by water in front of me, my sister Donna is ducking her head to (uselessly) try to keep the water out of her face, and Jerry, Sharon, and Megan are washing about in the back of the boat. What's about to happen next (as we learned later from Colin The Faithful Water Wizard) is that the wave that you see washing up against the near side of the boat actually broke over the side, burying that side of the raft. Now, this is generally not considered a "good thing." Moving water has tremendous force behind it, and weighs a lot, especially compared to the weight of an air-filled bag. When the "leading edge" (the near side in the above picture) went under water, it was like planting an anchor and the water coming from behind started lifting the other (left) side of the raft up. My sister Donna lost her grip, forgot where she was at, or was just tired of being in the hot sun. For whatever reason, she rolled:

Now, at this precise moment, everyone in the boat is thinking only one thing: "Oh, CRAP, we're going over!!!!" Well, everyone but Colin. He's thinking, "Oh, CRAP, they're going to get a picture of MY boat flipping over!!!" Well, I'll hold you in suspense no longer: no, the boat didn't tip. But we did lose Donna and her oar. Now, another thing you may want to keep in mind is Jerry, Donna's husband. If you look back up through the above pictures, you may notice that Jerry doesn't have an oar. That's because he has very bad carpal tunnel problems with his wrists, has had pinched nerves in his shoulders, and just can't handle the kind of physical punishment that oaring would incur. So, he was just along for the ride. However, just that fact was pretty remarkable. You see, Jerry doesn't swim. He HATES large bodies of water. Every year when we go to Sunriver for vacation (about 100 miles south of Maupin, but on the Deschutes still) we go floating in our little vinyl rafts (no rapids, alas), and Jerry has never gone with us. For some reason, he decided that this was just something he was going to do. A brave little tyke, yes?

Well, to finish up the story, we have one last picture:

Here we have Colin, The Incredibly Buff and Intrepid Water Rescuer pulling Donna back into the raft as her oar goes floating on by. She looks pretty wiped out in this picture, but really wasn't and didn't have a bad time of it at all, and we all appreciated her effort at making the trip all worth-while. :-)