Aug/ 10/ 17
When
you get woke up by
someone rushing
out of your tent at 2ish in the morning, one
could hope for at least one
thing… is he leaving early
to start breakfast? How nice of him... Hurl, barf, puke, upchucking, whatever you want to refer to it as; it doesn’t matter. The
unwelcome sounds of our comrade “losing his biscuits” was just
plain unwelcome to us all. Quietly someone had to be thinking, what
could
cause him to spew,
and who could be next? Jon
and his technicolor yawn subsided, and the rest of us were able to
slowly fall back asleep.
Usually,
us guys slept with relative
ease, but wow, was it ever cold. Most of us had Mummy Sleeping bags
along for the trip. These sleeping bags are very compact and do very
well in the cold. If you got out of your sleeping bag during the
night, it
wouldn’t take more than a minute and your teeth would start to
chatter, and you would get right back in that bag.
Morning
did eventually arrive and with it
came a decision. Dwylin our
85 year old had a real dilemma in front of him. To stay lying in bed
or to tackle the great adventure of trying to stand and try
to stay standing. The
cold weather along with blisters and the ever-increasing stiff joints
were really wreaking havoc on this guy. On the bright side, however, the
last 12 hours of joint pain would be the worst
that Dwylin would have to experience on our trip.
There
was no sense of rush to head out that morning with the hiking behind
us and floating before us. Also, we didn’t want to leave until
closer to 10 or 11 so
the water would have plenty of time to warm up for us.
We
headed out for the day around
10:30, with the current as
our guide. All we could
hope for was a peaceful float down the river and we basically had
that except
for the occasional hidden
rock that would nail your
derriere at Mach speed. Every once and awhile you would be talking
with someone, and all of a sudden, their
progress down the river would end because they jammed into a rock.
Other
than occasional places that you needed to get out and walk beside
your boat, which if there was a strong current could be a chore, we
would stop on occasion to see if we could find some fish, and usually
with no luck. Nate and Caleb caught the majority of the fish this
way. if I remember right, but I can’t be 100% certain. We were
able to take a picture of Nate catching a small fish in the water.
The fish ended up getting
away, but we didn’t care. After
all, it was a pretty small fish and would have been a small meal.
As
we continued down the river we kept coming up on new people. First,
we passed a group of four or five girls. Right after we passed them
we found a nice rock to jump off of and a nice area to fish, but I
don’t recall catching anything. A little later, we passed the same
group of girls, while they were eating lunch. One of them yelled
out, “Do you guys have any beer?”, and Dan replied by saying no.
“That would be a lot of weight
to carry around,” Dan added. The girls reacted
to that comment by asking if we had whiskey? We just laughed and
kept going on our way down the river. Dwylin actually did have a
flask with him, but it was filled with spicy olive oil. We didn’t think
it was necessary to bring this up to these strangers.
There
were others that we came across, and we gave most
of the group nicknames. We had names like the girls, the fishermen,
and mountain men. Our next
story will feature the fishermen, and just to make you aware these
definitely
were not the friendliest
group of guys that we have ever met. These guys just ignored us
and never said a word to us.
Now,
do you know how strong current works, while you’re
in a small boat? You have very little choice on where you’re
going, for the most part.
Well, one of our funnier stories to reminisce on is when Dwylin
accidentally
ran his boat into one of these guys while they were fishing. The
fishermen had a dog sitting in the back of his boat. His boat looked like this.
We
came rushing quickly on a rapid where this clown was standing there
in our way, with his boat trapped in place with his legs holding on
to it. He was in line with the current so that all of us would
probably get within five feet of him. Nate was one of the first to
go down and just barely avoided the guy, and Dwylin was next. O yea,
this guy was standing there fishing, which meant we needed to avoid
his hook as well. Unlike Nate, Dwylin absolutely nailed this guy’s
raft and
apologized while this guy
never said a word. Dwylin
nervously tried to
paddle his boat away from his boat, but…
Well,
let’s change to Dan’s perspective. Dan was already past this
part of the river and described what happened next as hysterical.
“All I heard was a dog yelping, so I turn around and saw Dwylin
paddling away. When Dwylin put
his paddle in the water to start his getaway. He accidentally didn't
have it in the water deep enough and splashed the fisherman's dog.
Dwylin’s head was now looking down, covered with embarrassment and
remorse. No one else felt this way, and they
all were quietly laughing at what happened. Mostly cause the other
guys wished
that they could have done the same to this roadblock that
was in our way.
The
day ended uneventfully with us just trying to find a campsite, but
most of them were already were taken up with other campers. We ended
up going about 15 to 17 miles that day, with roughly 8 miles left to
go.
We
got our boats out of the water and quickly discovered that the
contents of our bags were soaked. So it became a rush to get our wet
stuff out of our bags and upon a tree before the sun went down.
Our
next objective was
to set up our tent for the night, but mostly so that some of the guys
could play pocket rockets. The
guys who were not playing poker decided to head to bed early, but as
we laid there, we started feeling raindrops. Don’t
forget that we usually slept without the canopy on the tent so we
could cover our bags. We
were told that in Plains,
Montana, it had not rained
for the
six weeks before our trip.
If you don’t remember, that is where Dan &
Jon’s family is from.
Either way, it started to
rain, so we quickly ran out of the tent to get our tarp off the bags
and back on
top of the tent. Still, now we had another problem, our bags were
going to wet. So we brought them into the tent during the storm and
waited for the storm to pass. This didn’t make much sense to me
personally. We had pulled out of the river with our bags being wet
and tomorrow we’re going right back in the water. So why worry if
the bags get wet again tonight, but I’m no doctor.
We are ready to be done, and with only one night left, we will miss this adventure once were gone.
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