Saturday, May 9, 2009
On Saturday I was invited by a friend at work to take his raft down the Gunnison River from Escalante to Bridgeport. He’s planning a big trip on the Yampa in a few weeks and needed to get more practice on the water beforehand. This is a pretty easy section of river with a couple of Class II rapids along the way and is about 14 miles in length. With the spring runoff, the water was flowing pretty fast and we ended up completing the trip in about four hours. The water was also pretty cold, so we did our best to stay out of it, and succeeded.
I didn’t end up bringing my camera on this trip, but my friend had his, and I ended up taking a bunch of photos with it for him. Here’s some of the pictures from our short day trip.
Andrew inflating the raft at the Escalante boat launch
The raft along the shore near a campsite we stopped to check out
Headed down the river
A coal train zipping by us
Great scenery
Andrew and Jim
I even took over for a little bit
Some small rapids
An old cabin along the river
The new bridge at Bridgeport…
It was a nice relaxing day on the river and I managed to learn a lot, too. Looking forward to getting out on the local rivers some more!