Whitewater Rafting

Payette River - 2004

The middle squares of my t-shirt quilt are from whitewater rafting companies.  I first went rafting the week before final exams my senior year in college on the Lower Gauley River in West Virginia.  The remnants of a hurricane came through the week before and the water was running high.  I figured if I was going to die, I might as well do it before I had to take my finals.   It was a blast, and after that, I was hooked.

On our honeymoon, we had been going for a week straight when we got to Moab, Utah and we were beat.  We decided to spend a day and floated down the Colorado (which is actually pretty tame there).

When my daughters got older, I introduced the oldest two to rafting in the middle fork of the Flathead River in Montana.  A couple of years later, the whole family rafted down the Arkansas river in Colorado.  Gail spent the entire trip hanging onto the 8-year old Deanne, who would have fallen out multiple times otherwise.  We rafted the Payette River in Idaho, the Nooksack in Washington, but the most adventurous was a midnight raft trip down the Manatuska River in Alaska in July.  We had dry suits for that one, since the river begins from a glacier.

For our 30th Anniversary, we had a float trip down the Merced River in Yosemite, and a few years later, we channeled our inner Burt Reynolds by rafting the Chattooga River in Georgia, the filming site of Deliverance.

The white t-shirt on the quilt says it all. 

 It was once believed that the Earth was flat.  

And if you went too far you'd fall off the edge. 

  Cool!