In the morning we ran a section of the Claro.
The put in was, sketchy. Take off-roading. Add an old van stuffed to the gills with people. Then add a trailer with too short a tongue that thus makes a lot of racket. Open the windows to get air. Add blowing dust and allergy giving plants (it's spring). There. Now you have a picture of the drive there. Then, at the actual put-in, involved walking through a swarm of flying things, down a steep trail of loose gravel, and over logs placed as a bridge. WOO!!
True to its name, it was beautiful. The sky was clear, the water was clear (hence, claro) and the scenery was amazing. The challenge here was not being pushed into the cliff walls that surrounded the turns (and also where the rapids happened to be). Unfortunately I do not have a waterproof camera I wouldn't be scared to death about actually taking on the river, so I don’t have any pictures. L It was also surprisingly easy. I was prepared to be pushed around a little after being used to the ocean rather than a river. Kenneth looked at us and said "You're finding this easy aren't you?" We responded to the idea of "Yeah, it is!" and he just laughed…so we are apparently just getting that much better…which is a weird thought, because it doesn't feel like it…yet we didn't have any issues.
So that afternoon when we were given the opportunity to either run the Claro again, or join the others on the bigger, pushier, shallower, more continuous Teno, we decided to try the Teno. Kenneth warned us that we didn't want to flip, and we definitely didn't want to swim (due to rocks and lack of eddies). Compared to the Claro, the Teno is U-G-L-Y!! The water is murky and winds its way through random piles of loose, grey rocks, next to a bare brown mountain side on one side and the highway on the other. But what it lacks in looks it gains in awesomeness.
It did not begin well. I put in, following Kenneth, and instead of making the easy eddy I should have, I got spun around ultimately making a lower eddy, but not smoothly. Mackenzie, who was following me, flipped, missed her roll, and swam. Ok, we eventually got everything sorted out, Mackenzie back in her boat and continued on down.
The rapids were bigger than on the Claro…the waves were bigger, the rapids longer, but we still had places of relatively flat water to clear the mind. Then Nico flipped and swam, leaving Kenneth yelling at Mackenzie, Min, and I to get an eddy (by now very small and turbulent) and to stay were we are. So we are now hanging on to rocks with both hands as we get pulled downstream, while trying to keep our paddles from drifting away, and kinda scared of what's below us, having been given such strict orders to stay where we are. Jakub (one of our instructors) ends up walking up to us telling us to get out of our boats that we are portaging and walking down to where the rest of the group is.
The rest of the run went relatively smoothly, excepting Michelle's flip, which she rolled up on. J We got used to the water and the current and re-figured out how to get the boat where we wanted it to go and stay stable in the process.
Profound thought: Kayaking, in a way, teaches us how we should live life. Instead of dwelling on the past and what we did wrong, you learn the lesson (don't free-float into a hole) and move on, and face the next wave, the next obstacle. Ok. I admit, that's really funny coming from a history geek, but yet it's true. Because it's when you're beating yourself up for messing up on the last wave/hole/missed eddy, that's when you mess up again…
The put in was, sketchy. Take off-roading. Add an old van stuffed to the gills with people. Then add a trailer with too short a tongue that thus makes a lot of racket. Open the windows to get air. Add blowing dust and allergy giving plants (it's spring). There. Now you have a picture of the drive there. Then, at the actual put-in, involved walking through a swarm of flying things, down a steep trail of loose gravel, and over logs placed as a bridge. WOO!!
True to its name, it was beautiful. The sky was clear, the water was clear (hence, claro) and the scenery was amazing. The challenge here was not being pushed into the cliff walls that surrounded the turns (and also where the rapids happened to be). Unfortunately I do not have a waterproof camera I wouldn't be scared to death about actually taking on the river, so I don’t have any pictures. L It was also surprisingly easy. I was prepared to be pushed around a little after being used to the ocean rather than a river. Kenneth looked at us and said "You're finding this easy aren't you?" We responded to the idea of "Yeah, it is!" and he just laughed…so we are apparently just getting that much better…which is a weird thought, because it doesn't feel like it…yet we didn't have any issues.So that afternoon when we were given the opportunity to either run the Claro again, or join the others on the bigger, pushier, shallower, more continuous Teno, we decided to try the Teno. Kenneth warned us that we didn't want to flip, and we definitely didn't want to swim (due to rocks and lack of eddies). Compared to the Claro, the Teno is U-G-L-Y!! The water is murky and winds its way through random piles of loose, grey rocks, next to a bare brown mountain side on one side and the highway on the other. But what it lacks in looks it gains in awesomeness.
It did not begin well. I put in, following Kenneth, and instead of making the easy eddy I should have, I got spun around ultimately making a lower eddy, but not smoothly. Mackenzie, who was following me, flipped, missed her roll, and swam. Ok, we eventually got everything sorted out, Mackenzie back in her boat and continued on down.
The rapids were bigger than on the Claro…the waves were bigger, the rapids longer, but we still had places of relatively flat water to clear the mind. Then Nico flipped and swam, leaving Kenneth yelling at Mackenzie, Min, and I to get an eddy (by now very small and turbulent) and to stay were we are. So we are now hanging on to rocks with both hands as we get pulled downstream, while trying to keep our paddles from drifting away, and kinda scared of what's below us, having been given such strict orders to stay where we are. Jakub (one of our instructors) ends up walking up to us telling us to get out of our boats that we are portaging and walking down to where the rest of the group is.
The rest of the run went relatively smoothly, excepting Michelle's flip, which she rolled up on. J We got used to the water and the current and re-figured out how to get the boat where we wanted it to go and stay stable in the process.
Profound thought: Kayaking, in a way, teaches us how we should live life. Instead of dwelling on the past and what we did wrong, you learn the lesson (don't free-float into a hole) and move on, and face the next wave, the next obstacle. Ok. I admit, that's really funny coming from a history geek, but yet it's true. Because it's when you're beating yourself up for messing up on the last wave/hole/missed eddy, that's when you mess up again…
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