And the magical thing about feeling like a kid?

Time falls away and you are left with only the moment. It’s a vacation for the body AND the mind, which is something we all can use.

Here are ten ways river trips put you in the kid headset:

1. Fresh Air – Just like your mom always wanted. Breathe it in and savor it.

2. Boats! – Floating and bobbing, rowing or paddling, “nothing is half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.” Lewis Carroll, he of Wind in the Willows fame, knew his stuff.

3. Fire – The smell. The heat. The comfort. From watching the embers dance to unwrapping your s’mores, we’ve been drawn to it from the beginning.

4. Rocks & Water – These are the core elements that make your trip possible, the distillation of your experience. From curving side canyons to mammoth boulders, it’s like a geological candy shop.

5. Games – Bocce, ladder golf and hacky sack–perfect before-dinner activities–take on a whole new flavor on the river bank.

6. Stories – Stay out on the river long enough and you’ll hear everything from ghost stories to guide’s tall tales to bonafide history.

7. Dessert – Cooking a tasty treat in a giant pan over hot coals brings the wonder back to something that’s already wonderful. How cool is that?

8. Hiking – Just getting out there and tromping along the trail, seeing the sights, getting the blood flowing. The only reason you do it is because you want to.

9. Music – From the humblest strumming to the voice of an angel, there’s something about music that slows time and engages us on a different sensory level.

10. Laughing – You awake to it. And fall asleep to it. Even the river laughs if you listen just right.

All it takes is one river trip to understand. And you’ll carry that feeling with you forever on the best river of all, the river of life.

The post 10 Awesome Ways River Trips Make You Feel Like a Kid appeared first on River Currents.

These souvenirs will be tucked into crevices you might have forgotten you had.

We all have these hidey-holes, flaps, cracks and nooks that will remind us, hopefully only as long after as our first shower back in civilization, just how far out in the wilds we traveled, and what good clean fun it was getting a little bit dirty.

You will find sand in:

1. Your hair. Unless you’re used to a large, granular form of dandruff, this will be noticeable, no doubt. Depending on the thickness, curliness and natural oiliness of your hair, this should come out in exactly 1.5 shampoos. We hear that Vidal Sassoon was working on a special variety of conditioner just for raft guides and their guests, right before his untimely passing. We fear this secret formula may have departed with him.

2. Your belly button. Like the cotton lint of new T-shirts and your pajamas (yes, we know you wear the ones with the footies), you’ll be mining sand out of here. Yes, we know. This is just weird. Belly buttons are weird. Let’s move on. Slight pause, as the “outies” shout “yes!” in triumph of not having to worry about this.

3. Your shoes. Lots of folks wear a pair of sneakers on river trips. This is fine, except the perhaps largest deficiency they have compared to a good pair of sandals becomes evident after the trip: They will never stop producing sand. You’ll shake and beat them. You’ll remove the insoles and brush them. You’ll wash them. And they will never stop producing sand, almost like dunking them in the river has turned them into magical, foot-borne sand factories.

4. Your tooth brush. Maybe this is just me, I don’t know. But, despite a tooth brush case, protected by a toiletry case, wrapped into a towel, inside a dry bag, I have at least one crunchy bicuspid-cleaning moment per river trip and find myself wondering why the CIA doesn’t use sand to infiltrate the headquarters of our enemies around the world.

5. Your ears. Yeah, I know, you’d think you’d feel this. You’d think it’d come out the first time you Q-tipped the heck out of them upon your return. This is a wonder worthy of a Nova episode, really, because incredibly, as much as a week later, you’ll feel a tickle tumbling out of your cochlea, and tilting your head into your cupped hand, there it will be: a silicon dioxide souvenir.

I once worked at a Japanese restaurant — don’t ask why; it was before I discovered whitewater — and I used to be amazed at the places I would find rice had worked its way into. And, I’m not talking about cracks in the soles of my shoes. I’m talking about places, I thought, that had been protected by layers and layers of clothing.

But, no, there it was, hours later, sticky proof of where I’d been and what I’d been doing.

I mention this not as a wacky aside, because I know it’s a little bit gross, but to paint a picture for those high on the hygiene-need scale that, while a little sand in places that never truly touched the beach might be nettlesome, it could be worse. Rafting is way more fun than a bowl of rice in your Fruit of the Looms.

Are you still finding sand in your river gear? Tell us about that trip, and any tips for dealing with such challenges in the comments below.

The post 5 Places You Won’t Believe You Find Sand After A River Trip appeared first on River Currents.

No one does. It’s why vacations are so important. You’ve got to make every second count.

But you don’t want to be in “hurry up and relax”-mode the whole time.

You want something to do with your family that everyone’s going to like. And it can’t be all tourist-trap-y.

You need some real-deal vacation time.

Well, I’m here to give you the answer: white water rafting.

Seriously. Scenery? It doesn’t get better than a white water river. Fun? Throw buckets of water on your kids all day … ‘nuff said.

Adventure. Relaxation. Great food (no lie, the food is a highlight). A river trip has it all.

Here are 20 reasons why a rafting trip is the perfect family getaway:

1. Incredible value, and all-inclusive price (no extra fees for parking, meals, or ride tickets).

2. Getting hit with waves from all sides is ridiculously fun.

3. If they don’t already, your kids will think you are the god of awesomeness for booking the trip.

4. There are pools between rapids for swimming, water fighting and relaxing.

5. Your guides are just about the nicest, funniest, coolest people on earth.

6. Food is somewhere between incredible and amazing.

7. It’s good for the spirit to spend time on moving water.

8. Two words you’ll never hear on a river trip: I’m bored.

9. Rapids come in all sizes; we take you to the ones that are family-size.

10. You will get at least one photo that will be a guaranteed wall-hanger.

11. The sound of rushing rapids + laughter is one your family will never forget.

12. The family that splashes together stays together.

13. You can push your much-loved family members into the river.

14. Absolutely no iPods, iPads, iPhones, icomputers, or idistractions allowed.

15. If your kids get messy at lunch, just chuck them in the river.

16. Tame enough for mom, exciting enough for dad (or vice-versa, about half the time).

17. Your guides take care of everything for you; your only job is to have fun.

18. Prepping a family for a river trip is easy, and we help by giving you all the info you need.

19. Along with the fun, there’s a lot to learn out on river trips. Families love that part.

20. There is nothing — absolutely nothing — half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.

Ok, I stole that last one from the “The Wind In The Willows.” But still, totally true.

Fact: Family river trips rule. And those are just 20 reasons. Got more? Throw us a comment.

The post 20 Reasons Why A Rafting Trip Is The Perfect Family Getaway appeared first on River Currents.

Here’s a fact:

If you do a lot of whitewater river trips, you’ll hear stuff that, well, doesn’t make a lot of sense once you leave the river.

Here’s a short list of a few choice pieces of verbage: 

1. “You’re going to have to pull your pants up before you get back in the boat!”
   Not surprisingly, river currents that seem gentle can be, ah, strong.

   It’s not an everyday thing, but people have been known to lose their shorts to the whims of the river. Luckily, there’s a simple fix.

   Tie those suckers.

    

2. “Now it’s time to eat pudding with your face!”
   Family trips rock.

   One reason is because if the kids get messy, all you have to do is throw ‘em in the river for a rinse.

   Simple. Clean. Effective (and fun).

    

3. “When ancient map-makers wrote ‘The End Of The World’ on their maps, they were imagining this next rapid.”
   Guides have been known to, um, exaggerate.

   River stories are the imagination’s most fertile ground for tall tales. A big wave can easily turn into “a tsunami that blocked out the sun!” just moments after running it.

   Interesting fact: River stories get bigger and better details the farther away from the river you get.

    

4. “Actually, when we ran this at high water …”
   A continuation of the tall tales mentioned above, but high water stories are a special breed.

   After hearing a particularly good high water story, you’ll be convinced that everyone involved had just stepped out of Clash Of The Titans, and the river was overflowing because it was filled with unicorn tears.

    

5. “Today is going to be one of the greatest days of your life.”
   Ok, you won’t only hear that one on a river trip.

   But, on the river, you will hear it surprisingly often.

Got a personal favorite not on the list? Let us know in the comments.

The post 5 Things You Will Only Hear On A River Trip appeared first on River Currents.

If you have a soft spot in your heart for rivers, then chances are Martin Litton is on your list of heroes.

He first floated the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon in 1955 — the 185th known person to follow in explorer John Wesley Powell’s footsteps. Not long after, he founded Grand Canyon Dories and has since led scores of trips on the Colorado. In 2004 he broke his own record becoming the oldest person to row the entire Grand Canyon at the age of 87.

Lifelong environmentalist and wilderness activist, the now 95-year-old Litton continues to speak mostly with his actions. He’s currently on the Advisory Committee of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, a former travel editor for Sunset Magazine and he fought alongside fellow activists David Brower and Edward Abbey against dam proposals and the logging of Sequoia National Forest and Giant Sequoia National Monument.

How were you introduced to rivers?

At one point, I learned that a river trip — a Norm Nevills river trip, called Mexican Hat Expeditions — in 1952 was going to be running Lava Falls on a certain day. I don’t know how I found that out, but Esther and I had already taken the Toroweap Leap, that is where you step off the rim of the canyon and the whole side of the canyon starts moving with you as you go down to the bottom (to the river). We had done that and had actually climbed out at that point by Lava Falls. Don’t ever try it, it’s horrible, but at least I knew the way down and I’d decided to make a newspaper story out of it for the Los Angeles Times.

So I went over there, and a couple ladies who had gone down the river with Mexican Hat Expeditions found out about it and wanted to go with me. So we drove over there to the Toroweap Overlook (as it’s called), above Lava Falls, and we went down the so called trail. There is no trail, but as one of the ladies said, “From the moment we stepped off the rim, it was always a question as to which would reach the river first — us or the topography,” because everything moves when you move down that slide. So anyway, we got down there and I photographed what they did — they lined Lava Falls, they never ran it in those days. There was also a big cabin cruiser, a motorboat, in-board that was there being driven by Bob Rig of the Rig Brothers — that boat ran Lava Falls. So that big boat ran Lava Falls and I’ve got movies of that and stills. Those pictures of that run appeared in the Los Angeles Times, along with the article about what they were doing.

That really got me acquainted with the river because these people who ran the river with Nevills were about the only ones doing it and would always have big barbeques afterward and show all their slides. And those barbeques would be out in the San Fernando Valley somewhere, in a backyard, at night, and they would show the slides — everybody would show every picture that he or she had taken on the entire river trip. So you sat out there all night, eating and drinking and watching slides. And one of the people I met doing that, who had not been on the river at any time that I was associated with it, was P.T. Riley. He got in touch with me by phone later having met me there at this party, and wanted me to go down the river with him and row one of his boats that he was building out of fiberglass.

He knew I’d been on the crew rowing at UCLA, as if that would’ve had anything to do with skill on the river, it really wouldn’t, but as a result of that, even though I couldn’t row on the first trip because I’d had a bad accident with a horse and dislocated my shoulder. My arm was strapped to my side for the entire trip, 21 days; so I couldn’t row a boat on my first trip through the canyon. I was a passenger, and Esther went, she was a passenger, and there were a total — I think — of nine people on that trip taking these boats that P.T. Riley had made, which turned out to be [laughs] not very good boats. That started me.

Which river trip stands out most in your mind?

Maybe the second one which was the first time I rowed the boat all the way through with Esther, but actually until we got into dories — when we were no longer running those ridiculous little boats — we didn’t have great river trips because any trip in which you line a rapid and don’t run it can’t be really 100 percent great. We have to be able to handle all the rapids in the Grand Canyon, nothing from the shore, everything happens on the river, the boat makes it through and you hope you’ll be right side up at the other end, and we usually are.

What’s special about a dory?

Anyone who asks that question, what is special about a dory, has obviously never gone through the Grand Canyon in a dory. A dory is a shape that belongs on the river; it started in the ocean, conquered the waves of the ocean, and now conquers the waves or crashing water of almost any river. A dory is made for people to be in, it has the right shape. And in a Grand Canyon dory, you have the right places to put things, including yourself. The oarsman is accommodated as if the dory were made for him (or her), and it just belongs. I could describe the shape of a dory, which is a row boat, doesn’t have to be a row boat, it could have a motor on it, but ours never did; a boat propelled by two oars in the hands of a single oarsman because the decisions that are made as to the strokes you take and how you do the rowing have to be unanimous. The only way you get a unanimous decision is to have just one person making that decision, and the boatman (the oarsman) is responsible for what happens in the river because he/she is the one propelling and guiding the boat.

They show their utility, they say to you, “I belong on big waves; I’m stable, I’m sturdy, I’m wanting to go, and I respond to the oars beautifully,” that’s bragging, in a way, “and I’ll go where you want me to go, and I’ll carry what you want me to carry.” That’s what the dory does no matter how the water behaves.

How have modern-day dories evolved?

It’s hard to know how a dory evolved into the shape that it is now; although, you can say conditions caused that to happen. People wanted to go fishing in rough water in the Atlantic Ocean, Europeans. Gradually, they developed boats that were — more or less — self-righting (certainly were stable, as stable as you could get in big waves) and that were easy to maneuver, easy to row and that would move with pretty good speed. And gradually we came into the shape of what we call a dory. We say that the best representation of that was in Portugal, in the ocean fishing boats. Gradually that went West into the United States and we had fishing boats in New England that were similar; self-righting almost, very stable, easy to row, they moved readily when asked to, and so we got an Indian name, though I don’t know the evolution of the name dory exactly, but they say it’s an adaptation of an American Indian word, duri from the Caribbean Sea.

Then it became dory in New England and of course many, many fishing boats in New England are dories, rowed with oars (some are motored, of course, out into the ocean). When they moved west, we called them dories, eventually, but they were first called drift boats, mostly in Oregon where there are lots of runnable rivers and they were used for fishing, floating with the current of a river. Such as the Rogue River or the Mackenzie, and we ended up with a boat very similar, though not as big as the Grand Canyon dory. A Grand Canyon dory has to be bigger because it has to carry passengers through the canyon, not just one or two fisherman, and it has to be able to carry a load. It has to be able to haul all the equipment and all the supplies that are going to be needed on a trip of two or three weeks through the Grand Canyon which is going to take, well, time, obviously! And two or three weeks going through the Grand Canyon you need a hefty amount of supplies, so you put them in the dory, and once you close up the hatches, you hardly know they’re there. It just runs beautifully.

Why did you choose George Wendt and O.A.R.S. to carry on the dory legacy in the Grand Canyon?

The word got around, somehow, that I had other things to do. Grand Canyon Dories was doing alright, but that someone else could be owning it and managing it, yet I wasn’t willing to let it go just as a river running company and into some other hands in which it would run differently.

Things were going on in my life that demanded my attention and my presence more. I didn’t really want to stop what I was doing there, but owning Grand Canyon Dories was just too much fun. I couldn’t be having fun all the time, you know you’re not supposed to be happy in this world [laughs], and so I was ready to give up something that had made me very happy and which I’d enjoyed greatly. One of the conditions of the sale was that it would always be dories, and it would always be oar powered and they would run the trips the way we had run them. George happily signed up for that, there wasn’t a great deal of money involved. It could’ve gone higher if I had accepted some of the propositions I had from others, but George was the one I had faith in to do it right. He was doing it right with his oar-powered trips anyway, he just needed a little bit of an upgrade and that upgrade would be dories.

It said it on his license plate, “WE ROW,” and that meant that he was an advocate for rowing, so that gave him a pretty good place in my heart as one of those who wanted Grand Canyon Dories, who wanted to buy Grand Canyon Dories.

What is the most important issue facing us today?

The obvious, most important issue is numbers of people. The earth is already terribly overcrowded and overcrowding causes people to move around. In our case it causes people to move from Mexico to California, and [chuckles] we’re overcrowded. It’s the most important issue on the earth — movements of people, and growing numbers of people.

What is one thing you wish you had accomplished?

I wish I had accomplished some things in conservation that I did not. We could’ve stopped Glen Canyon Dam and we didn’t, but we didn’t try hard enough. We tried very hard in Grand Canyon dams and even harder in Dinosaur National Monument dams — those were our first big issue, and we beat them. Those were said to be necessary for the development of the West. Well we didn’t get them built, we fought against them, and they turned out to be unnecessary.

What are your favorite books about rivers?

What comes into my head immediately, and if I were to think longer I might find more, but a great book as far as the rivers are concerned (especially the Colorado River) is, Time and the River Flowing by Francoise Leydet. He’s one of the greatest writers in history that had a few problems that he couldn’t overcome, but when he did sit down and write a book it was a masterpiece. The amount of work that went into that is not only amazing, but the result is amazing. Time and the River Flowing: Grand Canyon by Francoise Leydet. Another one that he did was called, The Last Redwoods about saving the redwoods, and as a result of that book, more than any other thing, we obtained Redwood National Park.

Who are some of your heroes?

What’s heroic about having a good time? That’s what you’re doing when you’re in the Grand Canyon. Maybe not every minute, if you end up out of the boat and in the water, and the boats upside-down, you don’t feel heroic at that time.

What about conservation role models?

It certainly included David Brower who was the greatest conservationist of all time, that doesn’t limit him to the Grand Canyon though, I’m speaking of worldwide events. Dave Wegner, he worked for the Bureau of Reclamation and his job was to persuade the river runners and other conservationists that there could be dams in the Grand Canyon damming up the Colorado River in a way that would be acceptable. We said, ‘No, it will never be acceptable to put any dams in the Grand Canyon.’ And gradually, this guy from the Bureau of Reclamation who was trying to persuade us to accept dams in the Grand Canyon, came around to our side of the issue. He became a conservationist and brought the Bureau of Reclamation around in a way, and he himself more or less would not let them do what they wanted to do. As a result of that, partly, we didn’t get the dams. Dave Wegner stayed with the government and is involved in conservation within the government now in Washington D.C., he has a very responsible position, and the Bureau of Reclamation as you know doesn’t have any more ambitions about dams in the Grand Canyon, partly because we – as a group of people – talked Dave Wegner out of the idea.

[Paraphrasing Wind in the Willows…] “There is nothing, absolutely nothing quite so much worth doing, as simply messing about in boats.”

Say hi to Martin in the comments section below!

The post Meet Martin Litton, Grand Canyon Dories Founder appeared first on River Currents.

It was early March of 2003 and a blizzard had roared out of the north the previous night, so it took a moment to kick the snow off my boots before stepping inside the boathouse.  There I found myself staring up at a dozen diminutive rowboats that were unlike any kind of watercraft I had encountered.

Most were handsomely painted in bright colors, and several featured squared-off transoms adorned with hand-drawn scenes from the desert rivers of the Southwest: a bighorn sheep, a cluster of columbines, a peeping frog. What struck me most forcefully, though, was that the profile of each boat boasted the simplest and loveliest lines that I had ever seen. Their gunwales swept boldly from bow to stern in a curve that mirrored the rocker of their bottoms, while the profile of their flared hulls set up a pleasing contrast with the rigid ranks of eleven-foot oars that hung from the far wall in neat vertical columns.

A Life-Changing Moment

At the time, I had no idea that these boats, originally designed for cod-fishing on the gale-wracked combers off the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, had become legends on the Colorado, where they are renowned for their speed and elegance amid the river’s seething hydraulics. What I did know was that I was entranced. My jaw just hit the floor. And in an impulse that defied logic and common sense, I decided — right there — that even though I was 38 years old, I was going to have to quit my job and somehow find a way to follow those boats into the water-haunted world at the bottom of the grandest canyon on earth.

There are, of course, lots of middle-aged men who flirt with equally harebrained schemes before coming to their senses. So I’m not sure that I can adequately explain why I failed to abandon my own deluded inclinations, except to acknowledge two things that are obvious to anyone who has ever been smitten by the witchery of small wooden boats: the fact that dories are drop-dead gorgeous and that a man who permits himself to fall under the spell of that much beauty is apt to toss prudence and sanity straight out the window.

Which, in a nutshell, is how I became a baggage boatman for O.A.R.S.

Watching The Dories Work

In a typical expedition run by Grand Canyon Dories, the division of O.A.R.S. for which I work, each guide rows an elegant 17-foot dory christened in memory of a natural wonder that was heedlessly destroyed by the hand of man — doleful, elegiac names like the Ticaboo, the Emerald Mile, the Music Temple, and The Vale of Rhonda. But each trip is also supported by two inflatable rubber rafts that haul almost all of the gear and supplies, and that boast absolutely none of the dories’ seductiveness or charm. Unlike dories, the rafts get names considerably less lyrical than those of vanished ecological treasures — specifically, barnyard animals. There are the Ox, the Mule, the Clydesdale, and the boat to which I have developed the deepest and most abiding affection, the Jackass.

During the course of my apprenticeship, which is currently entering its seventh year, I have never been permitted to row a dory. At this point, my best guess is that I probably never will — only the most gifted, un-jackasslike boatmen are ever given that opportunity.  However, through my position at the tail end of the flotilla (mine is almost always the last boat in our running order), I’ve had the chance to do something almost as marvelous as actually piloting a dory. I’ve been able to observe them, study them, and moon over their magic like no one else.

I have watched those boats at all hours of the day and night, along every stretch of river, in every kind of weather. If you spend enough time staring at dories in this manner, sooner or later you realize that they are able to achieve a unique trick of visual alchemy. I’ve never quite figured out how they do it, but through some inscrutable wizardry involving the geometry of their rocker, the rhythm of their oars, and the force field of their own radiance, there are moments when they appear to be suspended not on the surface of the river but on the air itself.

That’s a wondrous thing, to be sure. But what I value even more, I suppose, has been the chance to watch what those dories do to the men and women who row them for a living.

Dory Guides

Although some folks would argue otherwise, dory guides are neither better nor worse than any other kind of river guide in the canyon.  Regardless of which company they work for, every veteran river guide has memorized every bend in the rock walls, every kink of the river, at every water level one would care to imagine. After spending years in this place, almost all guides have also come to regard the river and the canyon as home: the terrain that speaks to them on the deepest level, the landscape to which they most truly belong.

What makes dory guides special, however, is that they have come to understand that the delicate and impractical watercraft to which they have devoted the better part of their lives may stand as perhaps the finest, most eloquent metaphor for the canyon itself: its seductiveness, its fragility, its aura of timelessness and classicism, and its savagely incongruous mysteries. Because when it comes down to it, nothing expresses and contains those elements with greater fluency or concision than a little wooden boat.

The guides who row those little boats know one other thing, too. They know that the canyon, the river, and the dories present an elusive and intoxicating paradox. It is a paradox rooted in the fact that so many of us are willing to go such extraordinary lengths to seize in our fists an object or a landscape that seems to embody wildness and grace, presumably in the hope that doing so may enable us to establish a kind of spiritual stewardship over these things. And yet we invariably wind up discovering that the truth, like an eddy, runs in the opposite direction.

In the end, it is the distillation of wildness and grace that comes to possess us, and we who belong to it.

This essay was originally created for the 2011 O.A.R.S. catalog. For more compelling stories from other renowned writers, request your catalog copy today!

The post The Grand Canyon Dory — A Colorado River Legend appeared first on River Currents.