October 12th, 2002
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Going to West Virginia to go rafting... It's been almost exactly 4
years since I have travelled here for the same reason. A very interesting 4 years. This time, I'm
with a group of people I know hardly at all. Tracy from my indoor soccer team, who has hosted
many a good party, organized this trip many moons ago. It started out being a large group
that said they would go. Then everyone realized that a trip to go rafting costs money and means
you have to get up off your butt to go out and have fun. So about two-thirds of the people
that said they were interested backed out. It ended up with a total of 5 of us. Me, Tracy and 3 other
gentlemen. They were mainly co-workers with Tracy, so I did not know them at all. Now I'm trying to put
the pictures online and I cannot even remember their names..
The last time I was here, I tried to invited along someone who I was interested in at the time. She did not know me well enough, so she decided not to take me up on the trip for the Lower Gauley. Now I'm back to complete the journey, doing the Upper Gauley, and she is getting married. Funny how life throws these fun twists of fate into our lives. When I first volunteered to go on the rafting trip, it was late Spring and a date for the wedding had not been set yet... It was mid-summer that I find out that both events are set for the same date. As much as I wanted to see her get married... It would have been a very weird feeling for me, and I would have lost my $200 deposit for the rafting trip. It was the feelings more than the money that made me choose to leave the state and get outside for the day. There's a much more involved story than this... but I'm not sharing that with everyone.
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It started out as a very cool day with a bit of a breeze. The
sky was overcast which was nice for me. Too much sun makes for bad reflections off of the
water and some serious sunburns. I was one of the few that opted for no wetsuit. Shorts
and a t-shirt worked for me. The smell and restrictiveness of the wet suit just do not work
well for me. Guess I will have to get a new opinion of them when I get SCUBA certified.
Oou guide was pretty cool. The others in my raft were also fairly cool people. We had 2 trainees on the raft who were familiar with the river, but not enough to be guides. The rest of my group, Tracy and the 3 guys, were on a Lower Gauley trip. I was the only one from my group on the Upper. That's fine by me. It gave me the day to just sit and ponder about life in general. I've learned something about river photography. Taking pictures from within the raft just do no good. All the water looks flat except for a few white caps here and there. Not very impressive at all. There are a few shots of the crew in the boat with water behind them. That was a good wall of water. The Upper Gauley has some solid class 5+ rapids and we hit some good waves. I took the opportunity to throw myself out of the boat and get some swimming lessons while I was at it. At one point we stopped and I did this nice half flip-twist dive off a cliff that ended up being nothing more than a nice back flop. I got applause from several rafts though... The part where we stopped for lunch was pretty darn awesome. There's a nice ridge in the rocks there with a good 8 to 10 foot drop to go over in the raft. We managed it without too much trouble, but all through lunch everyone was cheering on the rafters. (Most of them were shouting the wrong commands to them... hoping they would dump.) The lunch we had was excellent and then we only had a short ways to go to finish the trek. Oour tour finished first. I got back to the lodge, took a shower and then changed and sat around waiting for the rest of the group. Tracy and the others showed up about an hour later and Tracy was in some serious pain. She'd hurt her knee before and was planning on having surgery in November. Then she wrenched it again on the trip. They showered and changed and we broke camp. We originally had the campsite for two nights, but with the injury and such, we all left to head back that night after dinner.
It was a fun trip and I'm glad I went. I was sorry to miss the wedding,
but it was probably for the best. Life marches on...
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