San Juan River Trip

Well, I finally got my pictures back from Walmart from our river trip, so I guess it is time to update the blog. I find it funny that back in the day, it took only a few days and about $4 to get a roll of film developed. What's it like now? Well, almost 2 weeks and $12 later, I'm here to tell you. So a few weeks ago, the first week of April to be precise, we set out on an adventure!!! My dad and I joined some fellow rafters for a week long river trip on the San Juan. We pretty much became best friends for life. Some background info real quick. The San Juan is located in the southeast corner of Utah and runs into Lake Powell. You have to drive through a lot of indian reservation to get there from Phoenix. It's pretty crazy.

There aren't a lot of maps that show it well, so this is all you get. But you can probably see the little blue line running from Colorado to Lake Powell. That's it my friends. Although blue isn't exactly the right color to portray the water...the whole week I couldn't help but think of a giant bottle of Yoohoo.

Anyway, I don't have the whole group picture yet, but when I finally get it from Lincoln I'll post it on here. Probably. But the group consisted of: me and my dad

Mort and my dad's cousin Derek. (Derek planned the whole trip. Mort's real name is Craig Mortensen. He is in Derek's ward in Craig, Colorado and is awesome.)

Les and Betty Jo Anderson (also from Derek's ward)

their son, Joe, and his roommate Brett from BYU

and Derek's sons, Lincoln and Taft, and Lincoln's friend Robbie

They're the only ones with an action shot, because that was the only real action on the whole trip. One rapid. Called Government Rapid. Who knows why. But ya...the river was pretty docile, not at all what I was expecting. At first I was kind of disappointed their were no death defying rapids, but the first night we got to camp and all my gear was still dry, I realized it wasn't too bad. I was also worried about the length of the trip - Tuesday morning through Saturday afternoon - but it wasn't as bad as I thought. Even the portable toilet was kind of nice after a while. Don't get me wrong, it's still not my friend. But it wasn't too bad to have a long.

We went on a few "hikes". Derek promised they were easy. They weren't. But we saw some cool stuff and I guess I'm glad I went on them.

Because it was such a flat river, we pretty much had to row down the whole thing. Sometimes Dad made me row. Sometimes I didn't like it that much. But it made my muscles feel big. And I got a sweet callus.

We were on the water from about 10-2 and then we'd stop for lunch and then resume and get off about 7 or 8 at the campsite. It was a lot of water time. The whole trip was about 80 miles. Sometimes in the morning it was freezing and I hated it. Two different mornings I had about an hour nap on the front of the boat. Those were great. The last morning it was so cold I got the sleeping bag out and got in it for about 3 hours. I liked that.

I was expecting a lot of red rocks, but we didn't have many until the last day.

We made it to the take out Saturday afternoon sometime. That was the crazy thing about "river time." You didn't know what time it was really and you didn't care. But we made it there, our car was not stolen or broken into, it hadn't rolled off a cliff into the river, and we packed up and went home.

All in all...pretty sweet trip.