{"id":21921,"date":"2019-12-16T09:19:37","date_gmt":"2019-12-16T17:19:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/community.nrs.com\/?p=21921"},"modified":"2021-01-21T16:43:19","modified_gmt":"2021-01-22T00:43:19","slug":"family-rafting-101-his-and-hers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/community.nrs.com\/duct-tape\/2019\/12\/16\/family-rafting-101-his-and-hers\/","title":{"rendered":"Family Rafting 101: His and Hers"},"content":{"rendered":"

The best luck I ever had was falling in love with someone who was already in love with rivers. And me (most days). And bad sci-fi, so we\u2019re good there, too.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

My first rafting trip with Casey launched just two days after we met during a guide training course for the summer camp for which we both worked. It was a beautiful early May day in 2005, full of wind and rain and a high of forty degrees. Ice began to form on the rubber as we hand-pumped the boats in Rainbow Park by the Green River. <\/span><\/p>\n

The weather was so bad, in fact, that the camp director offered that anyone not interested in masochistic hypothermia could bail on the training and come back with him in the truck. Caught down by the river with my pants down\u2014literally\u2014 when he announced this, I missed the opportunity. Had I heard that offer, I would be writing a very different story today. Fortunately, I didn\u2019t hear it and hopped miserably aboard with Casey and everyone else. After scouting and running Moonshine Rapid in the rain an hour later, I couldn\u2019t feel the lower 30% of my body nor eight of my fingers, but I have never looked back, and neither has he.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Three years and hundreds of river miles later, in July, our engagement party involved introducing both of our parents and assorted siblings to each other and the river on a three-night trip from Loma to Westwater Canyon. At the time, Casey and I had been pulling major wilderness trips with various outfitters\/private groups ranging from 5 to 10 days. In our minds, three nights was \u2018easy.\u2019 Of course, in hindsight, we realized the same effect could have been accomplished by a third of the time and three times the amount of booze. Yet our families loved us that much and didn\u2019t even disown us when we eloped a few months later.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Fast-forward five years. It was June and we were back in Ruby Horsethief canyon, only this time with our fifteen-month-old son, Hunter, and two friends whose daughter was the same age. It was our first rafting trip as parents and was, from an objective perspective, nearly a total disaster. Three out of four adults woke up to food poisoning on the second morning, and the mosquitoes were as bad as I\u2019ve ever seen (and yes, I have launched from Sand Wash in late June). Not only were Casey and I already rigging at half strength while one adult kept the toddler from drowning, but now that adult was only a husk of their former self after projectile vomiting for an hour.<\/span><\/p>\n