If you’ve felt the surge of adrenaline that comes with outdoor adventure, and then rehashed those memories with the friends you shared it with around a campfire later that evening, there were likely some epiphanies articulated.

Sometimes, those joyful expressions find their form in verse.

One of our repeat guests, Lee Marc Stein, was so moved. After a trip on Oregon’s Rogue River, Lee shared this one with us.

Streaming

Now, that is good stuff.

Nice work, Lee.

The post How Adventure Makes Poets Of Us All appeared first on River Currents.

My mother is not at all what you’d call the “outdoorsy type.” Yet, at 65 years old, she spent 8 days rafting the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon.

Yes, she even did the icky-dirty “C” word.

(That’s “camping.”)

The secret is — and don’t go shouting this to the true outdoorsy types, lest they get their camo pants all in a bunch — there are plenty of ways to make “roughing it” not so rough at all.

In fact, you’ll find true pros in the adventure travel business distinguish themselves through their innovative ways to bring luxury with you into the wilderness.

Sleeping

“Sleeping is usually the biggest issue for most people,” says James Rodger, California regional manager for O.A.R.S. “People hear they’ll be sleeping on the river, and they immediately think ‘dirty old sleeping bag.’”

James is happy to disappoint those folks with freshly laundered sleeping bags, cozy zip-in liners, pillows with fresh, crisp pillow cases and, the icing on the bedtime cake, a 3-inch foam-and-air-filled sleeping pad.

What’s more, James says, you’d be surprised at the psychological difference it makes putting only 2 people in a 3- or 4-person tent.

Staying Clean

Kate Wollney is trying to convince her sister-in-law to join her on a river trip. Kate is O.A.R.S.’s Rogue River manager, leading adventures in Oregon. She’s explaining the biggest misconception she finds: You’re going to get dirty, and won’t be able to get clean.

Even though the nightly riverside camps are on sand, or pea gravel, or bedrock, the sites are regularly scoured clean by the river’s rising and falling waters, she says.

“So even though we’re ‘on the ground,’ it’s not really dirty at all,” Kate says. “On the Rogue, there are even spots where the ground is covered in mint, and when you walk you crush it, and it smells unbelievable.”

The guides also make sure there’s ample opportunity to clean up. They set up portable kitchen and bath sinks at every stop, and handwashing stations are never far away. Kate added there’s even opportunity on many trips for bathing.

“On some of our trips, but not all, you can bathe right in the river,” she says. “And several of the rivers have hot springs, which is a great way to stay refreshed.”

Way Better Than Beans & Weenies

“I’ve got wild salmon, organic chicken, organic chicken maple breakfast sausage, applewood bacon, artichokes,” James lists off. He’s shopping for a Tuolumne trip while talking to me on the phone.

James explains that if people expect dehydrated food or cans of pork and beans, they’re blown away by the quality meals they’re served. James explains they procure as much of the victuals as they can from local sources, and they try to shop organic as a rule. They have partnerships with local wineries and craft breweries, so even the adult beverages are local to the area.

Hot breakfast every day, an energy-filled lunch, dinner with appetizers, drinks and dessert each night — it’s better than some folks eat at home.

“It’s river-gourmet,” James says.

The Unmentionables

So, OK, for some people, there’s no talking about going to the bathroom in the woods that makes it sound any more comfortable. But, hopefully, you can appreciate the lengths the guides go to in addressing this.

Yes, the bathroom comes along from campsite to campsite. It’s set up in a private location a discrete distance from camp, and a handwashing station is always right next to it.

“And it always has an incredible view,” James adds.

Kate explains that the bathroom solutions aren’t just one-size-fits-all, either, and that women’s needs are anticipated and accommodated.

Outdoor Evangelists

For these professional guides, guests’ comfort becomes a matter of pride. Those who think they relish in their own discomfort and or wish it on guests have it all wrong. (Bear Grylls is not a river guide.)

James explains that what they all want are guests who come back again, hopefully with more friends.

“Guides are really passionate about what they do, and they want people to come out with a really positive attitude about their trip,” he says. “So they’re going to go the extra mile to make sure everyone has a positive experience.”

Even my 65-year-old mum.

Got a question on comfort for the O.A.R.S. guides? Hit them up in the comments below.

The post Going Outside Your Comfort Zone Has Never Been So Comfortable appeared first on River Currents.

This was after a day during which we had leapt from 15-foot-tall cliffs, swam through trains of standing waves, and negotiated scream-inducing rapids mined with boulders, huge suckholes, and raft-swamping ledge drops. The sun had just slipped behind the rim of the gorge and our party of 11 had emptied a gigantic Dutch oven of its chicken-chili-cornbread contents. We’d drawn our camp chairs close as the conversation turned to old college stories and river stories and assorted misadventures endured in the pursuit of adventure.

But Markie wanted to catch a newt.

She’d plucked a reed from the riverbank, bored a hole in a hunk of jicama left over from dinner, and strung the two together in the form of a primordial fishing implement from “Survivor.” Could I help?

The Wild Child

I could not have been more comfortably slumped in a camp chair, or more engaged in the rounds of tall tales. In fact, I could not have been less interested in the remote possibilities afforded of South American legumes, a piece of tall grass, and aquatic vertebrates.

So, of course, I got up from the chair and dangled jicama for newts with my daughter. Within minutes, one of the bug-eyed creatures sidled up to the sodden bait and started nibbling. Markie slowly pulled in the reed, and I scooped the salamander up in my hands.

We have talked about that moment for months. We will talk about it for years. It taught me a lesson in how to turn a guided wilderness trip into one of the greatest gifts you could give your kid. And yourself.

Wilderness trips impose on a relationship a commonality of purpose and direction and even velocity of experience. You slow down to the pace of the paddle, of the trail rising ahead, of the dry fly drifting through the riffle. There is no electronic hypnosis through a flat-panel screen. There are constellations, not pixels. This, in turn, provides fertile ground for the sort of life-lasting connections that become increasingly difficult to foster as a son or daughter soars through the teenaged years.

Our trip to the Rogue had its genesis in Rob Kesselring’s self-published memoir “Daughter Father Canoe: Coming of Age in the Sub-arctic,” the story of Kesselring’s and daughter Lara’s 27-day canoe trip through the Northwest Territories in the summer of Lara’s 14th birthday. I shared the book with Markie, and she immediately insisted on a pact: Let’s do something like that some day.

I’ve paddled remote rivers across Alaska and Canada, but to work up to a multi-week father-daughter trip, I told her, we’d need a guided, multi-day trip as a shake-down cruise, of sorts. Oregon’s Rogue River was a perfect fit.

More Than Adventure

We put in at Oregon’s Galice Resort — 3 oared rafts piled high with tents, personal gear, food, inflatable kayaks, and a group of wide-eyed rafters ranging in age from 10 to nearly 70. For 5 glorious, blue-sky days we floated and swam and paddled our “duckies” through roaring boulder fields and narrow canyons. We caught snakes and day-hiked to ghost ranches and picked blackberries by the bucketful. We watched river otters and launched water fights and lay in our tent with the doors zipped open, wishing for one more falling star.

Before the trip, I could not have imagined the endless and vast and varying types of pure hoot-and-holler fun we packed into 5 too-short days.

But there was more. Over the previous year, Markie had grown up — up and a little bit away — at an astonishing rate. There were fewer requests for bedtime stories. Her door sprouted a sign requesting potential trespassers to please “knock first.” She and I have always been connected at the soul — the wildlife lovers, the contrary spirits, the gregarious loners. It has been said that parenting is largely a process of learning to let go, and letting go was something I’d been doing a lot of where Markie was concerned.

I yearned for a new way to connect, a means to propel us into a new kind of relationship rooted in her emerging self-awareness of who she was apart from mother and father, and where her spirit seemed to be taking her on the untested spectrums of self-reliance, comfort with adventure, and new experience.

When we leapt together off a high cliff and plunged into a bathtub-sized swimming hole of 63-degree water, she emerged from the river with her arms around my neck, screaming her desire to jump again and again and again and again.

I knew then that answers to certain questions of the future were coming to her and I together. And I knew that I would return to that exact spot in exactly 3 years with my 7-year-old son, Jack.

Plan Your Trip

You learn plenty of lessons planning a first-time wilderness trip with your kid. Here are some of the best decisions I made:

Do your homework. There are a few specific questions to ask of an outfitter:

• Are family-oriented departures available? Some outfitters offer itineraries—and hand-pick guides—specifically for trips where there will be kids or youth along. This way you won’t be paired with a honeymooning couple or stuck with a guide who will make that second PBJ only begrudgingly.
• What is the client-to-guide ratio? The number (and character) of the guides on our Rogue River trip was perfect: 3 guides to 11 clients. There are no hard-and-fast rules about this, for different trips require a varying set of helping hands. If the client-to-guide ratio creeps above 6-to-1, however, have a serious conversation with the outfitter about your expectations.
• What is the daily pace of the trip? When I first read that we’d be on the water an average of 6 hours a day, I was a bit concerned. What in the world would we do the rest of the time? The answer: Climb trees, jump off cliffs, skip rocks, explore hidden side canyons. Take a hard look at the itinerary to make sure you’re not being pushed.

Let your child help choose the trip. Maybe you think it would be grand to horsepack for 5 days with your kid. Maybe your kid doesn’t. Maybe you should listen.

My friend Tim Lassiter recently proposed to Austin, his 14-year-old son, a serious backcountry mule deer hunt. “But I could see it in his eyes,” Lassiter reported later. “He didn’t want to disappoint me, but he wasn’t jumping up and down about the idea, either.” Lassiter asked his son for his idea of a dream trip with dad, and then they booked a Costa Rican multisport venture that involved fishing for sailfish, ATVing through the jungle, touring local villages, and hiking through national parks.

“The best thing I ever did,” Lassiter said, “was listen to what Austin wanted.”

Personalize the trip. Commercial wilderness trips have to rely on a certain degree of cookie-cutter logistics. The group sleeps in similar tents, eats the same food, wears the same color life jackets. Do what you can to individualize the experience. Early on, Markie asked if we could take our beloved yellow and purple Marmot tent; she loves waking up to the ethereal yellow glow that suffuses the tent interior when the sun rises. It seemed ridiculous given that O.A.R.S. provided fine tents that didn’t need to be packed, checked on an airline, and fussed over. But we took it. And I’ll baby that yellow tent for as long as I can, knowing that each time we pitch it in the future, we’ll remember our clifftop campsite at Mule Creek Canyon, or the sandy beach along some unnamed riffle where we caught the newts.

Consider taking a friend. I anguished over this. My sole purpose for putting this adventure together was to spend sustained one-on-one time with Markie and allow for serendipitous, meaningful moments of connection to happen of their own accord. I didn’t want to be a chaperone. But I also was aware that the welcome mat between father and child might wear thin during 5 days of togetherness.

In the end, Markie and I had a good chat about what this trip was all about — and we invited George and Katie, another father and daughter, to join us. I knew George would share my desire to center the trip on the bond between father and child, and their presence added immeasurably to our experience.

But I still worked hard to maximize face-time with my daughter. When she wandered off to pick blackberries, I wandered with her. When she turned in at night, I turned in, and our time together in the tent, reading and writing in our journals, led to moments of connection that we’ll talk about for the rest of our lives. It was no easy feat to leave the riverside gathering spot when the story-swapping grew to a fevered pitch. But I’m glad I did.

The Effect It Has On The Kids

“How about this!” Markie grinned one morning, as she scooped up hunks of cantaloupe from the riverside buffet. “Appetizers for breakfast!” For 5 days, our girls never complained, never groused, never pouted. They played cards in the tent, scooped up minnows with the camp colander, scrambled barefoot across miles of lichen-covered boulders, and dutifully marched off to “the Groover” — the designated camp latrine — with a raft paddle in hand with which to mark its occupancy.
They washed their own dishes. They said “yes, ma’am” and “no, sir” and “please” and “thank you” with no prodding. They learned the lesson of getting along with others even when those others were teenaged boys for which (at least for the time being) they can ascribe neither purpose nor function in their universe. Dealing with, and being happy with, the circumstances immediately at hand is an enduring lesson of wilderness travel.

It was as if the woods and the water and the lack of civilization had somehow civilized them — the cotillion of the Rogue.

Even on the river, I wondered how long this would last: How long would we enjoy a kind of cosmic father-daughter afterglow once swim practice and Saxon math homework re-entered our lives? On our second-to-last day in the woods, we were picking blackberries on a periwinkle-cloaked ridge above Mule Creek Canyon. Markie was humming to herself a tune punctuated with grunts of pain from the thorns, and this unselfconscious chorus of content rose above the sibilant sighs of the whitewater 200 feet below, and there were black-tailed deer grazing along a distant gravel bar, heads rising whenever a pot or pan would clank from camp, and Markie said, through cheeks stuffed with berries, “Daddy, I wish we could do this all of our lives.”

And I thought: We will, sweetheart. A week or two at a time.

This essay was originally created for the 2012 O.A.R.S. catalog. For more compelling stories from other renowned writers, request your catalog copy today!

The post How To Plan A Vacation That Reconnects The Family appeared first on River Currents.

After 5 days and 4 nights of rugged luxury rafting with O.A.R.S., she changed from an apprehensive first-time rafter, to a wilderness enthusiast.

I completely understood her enthusiasm. This was my first rafting trip, too. I loved the idea of spending more time in the mountains, but with 2 small children at home and a fear of adrenaline-rushing experiences, I put off the idea as too risky and hoped to do it “someday.”

‘Someday’ Arrives

Fortunately, I had the opportunity to change that “someday” to “now” and joined O.A.R.S. on the Rogue River. As Dan, another member of our rafting trip told me one night while sitting in our camp chairs next to the hypnotic white noise of the river, “You need to live your own adventure — otherwise you’ll end up telling other people’s stories instead of your own.”

Those words would stay with me for the duration of the trip.

There were 17 very diverse members of our group. There were brothers, the eldest at 75 years old, and his younger brother who walked with a cane from injuries incurred in the Vietnam War. There were two women, long time friends, in their mid-70‘s — one having been on many rafting trips herself, the other excited about being on her first. There were active young married couples, others with physical limitations, and even some single travelers.

Despite our differences, we quickly formed a tribe and connected over delicious camp meals with wine glasses in hand. Like many people who have never been on a rafting trip before, I made up the story of what it would be like and who it would be with without living the real experience. Reality was far more interesting.

The Preparation

There were 3 different types of rafts that we could choose from while running the river — an oar raft, a paddle boat led by a guide that had seats for six rafters, and the “duckies” which were inflatable kayak rafts. The level of effort you put into the rafting experience was similar to an exercise video with a selection of intensity levels — easy, moderate, and challenging. You were never pressured to go beyond your physical abilities.

After an instructional safety meeting with our expert guides, we were ready to paddle onto the Rogue. Helmets on and personal flotation devices snug, we pushed off. Within moments, as we were passing into the Wild and Scenic part of the trip under Grave Creek Bridge, one of the rafters in a ducky lost control and flipped into the river.

This is when the trip got real. As we were instructed, our guide blew three quick whistles, alerting our tribe that a rafter had become a swimmer. We paid close attention as our guide maneuvered the paddle boat to get the swimmer back to riding the rapids. While initially shocking, it was essentially an effortless non-issue with the guides keeping our trip safe.

Our guide had us lift our paddles in a glistening yellow peak above the paddle raft, “On the count of three —one, two, three — WILD AND SCENIC!” Our adventure got off to an exciting start.

The Magical Journey

We navigated the river through large canyons covered in a thick shag carpet of trees towering above us. We explored waterfalls surrounded by the shimmering emerald leaves of Alder trees, and had fun jumping off cliffs near turquoise pools of creek water. We had a nice mix of rafting time, relaxing moments during our meals, and dry time hiking the banks.

At the end of our days, our guides prepared our gourmet dinner. We sat back and, aside from effortless tent set up, enjoyed a work-free vacation. We delighted in an incredible dinner of ceviche, and caprese salad skewer appetizers paired with Pisco Sours, salmon moussaka entrees paired with Oregon wine, and crème brulee with a wedge of dark chocolate perched on top. It was unbelievable that we were eating so well on the banks of the river.

After dinner, the early risers hit the sack while the night owls spent the evening laughing and discovering constellations under the starry night sky. Basking in the darkness never got old. We slept soundly, lulled by the waves of the Rogue.

My Own Stories To Tell

I decided to experience the single ducky on my own, paddling exhilarating rapids while Steelhead jumped out of the river next to me, and Osprey circled above watching their every move. The water was refreshing, and the adrenaline now addicting.

At camp, we noticed a black bear meander down from the opposite side of the river, snacking on wild blackberries and happening across a gigantic wild salmon in the water. He scooped it from the river and carried it to a rock, where we watched him eat his dinner — slowly savoring every bite and licking his lips. Meanwhile, we relaxed on the rocks sipping wine and craft beer, enjoying a real life National Geographic moment.

At the end of our rafting journey, people began telling stories of previous adventures to pass the time on the drive back to our cars, and Dan’s words echoed in my mind — “You have to live your own adventure, otherwise you’ll be telling other people’s stories instead of your own.” This was certainly not going to be my last wilderness trip, and the next time I go rafting, I’ll be able to share my story about my adventure on the Rogue River.

“I went rafting down the wild Rogue River with O.A.R.S., and had this amazing adventure with bears, almost tipping a raft, and swimming through a rapid, all while eating incredible gourmet food …”

This essay was originally created for the 2012 O.A.R.S. catalog. For more compelling stories from other renowned writers, request your catalog copy today!

The post Confessions Of A First-Time Rafting Trip Paddler appeared first on River Currents.