For weeks, people warned me about my first whitewater rafting trip. The gist of it: “Oh, wait, you’re going in Colorado? Oh, Lord help you.”
I heard stories about rafts capsizing. Rafts flipping over and pinning people under them. Broken bones. Basically, sheer terror.
So, yeah, I was psyched. I’m all for false senses of fear. Maybe don’t put me on a front in Afghanistan, but I am all about the fake haunted house. All of these people lived to tell the tale of their whitewater rafting misadventures, and I wanted in.
It turns out not every river reaches Class IV or V rapids. Or really, even Class II if we’re being honest. Even in Colorado.
But, it doesn’t mean you can strut your stuff for the next week or check “Colorado River” off your bucket list.
We started our day milling around the Vail Transportation Center, NOVA pickup time: 10am. Zach, our Vail-living, 14er-hiking, and smoothie-making friend joined us.
In the empty parking lot, two other guys approached us. Enter Richard and Jon. They might as well as had Angelenos-on-Mountain-Adventure stamped on their foreheads. Hands tucked confidently in brand new track pants, matching fleece tops, arms ruched just so, wrap around mirrored shades, and pristinely white sneakers. Richard, salt and pepper hair glinting in the sunlight, told us about his job: “distressed mergers and acquisitions. You know, like hostile takeovers, aggressive stuff.” You know.
Not soon after, with Richard and Jon quickly forming a guy crush on Dave (it happens. Dave is what you would call, The Funny Guy. At the party, at work, at your Colorado River whitewater adventure), a 10 seater passenger van with bouncing yellow and blue rafts jostling behind it careened around a corner and stopped.
Our tanned and floppy haired driver, bounded out and welcomed us. Prince William, with his heir of authority, thin nose, light blue eyes, and boyish tousled hair (fine, a young Prince William) followed, mellow and serene as a guy on a permanent mountain sport’s high.
Now, none of us really knew what to expect with this NOVA trip. What we surely didn’t expect were the two families wearing leather jackets, black jeans, a seven year old in a GLA-MOU-ROUS sequin t-shirt, and her toddler sister that piled in a few minutes later.
We were all thinking it, but Richard, not one for subtlety, barked out “We want to be in the same raft as Dave and Zach.” Prince William may have rolled his eyes behind his shades, but assured him he would be.
Sixty miles later, NOVA had us change into wet suits, booties, life vests, and (oh, the irony) helmets. We also picked up two new adventurers: Amy and Evan, a couple from St. Louis.
With the families swiftly commandeering the vans to use as private changing rooms, Dave and I huddled behind the van, putting our years of changing in high school locker rooms to good use. Over our shoulders, we heard Richard talking to new guy Evan: “Distressed mergers and acquisitions. You know, like hostile takeovers, aggressive stuff.”
As we all asked each other for favors clasping neck buttons and positioning our vests, Amy nervously whispered to her husband, “this seems like a lot of equipment…helmets?…”
Back to the van, where we bobbed around the backseat in our life vests like fluorescent yellow Marshmallow Men, and to our launch site. Or, a concrete embankment under a bustling I-70. With the rush of cars above us, Amy took to hovering around Prince William: “this isn’t going to be a fun ride, right? No funny stuff. Right?”
Prince William handed out raft crew assignments: the families in one raft, the rest of us in an other. He quickly went through basic paddling techniques. When we got to the part about what to do in the event someone fell in the water, Amy eyed us all, “that won’t be us, right?” She’d been whitewater rafting before, you see, in Tennessee? And the guide did stuff to actually make people fall in? Seriously. And it was not funny.
It would later come as a complete surprise that boyfriend Evan was something of an extreme sport thrill seeker with an Irish brogue.
Now, admittedly, the first quarter of our ride was actually whitewater fun. Prince William did his best to “Whoops! We’ve spun around! Left side, PADDLE PADDLE PADDle.” Lots of hollering, lots of water rushing through our wet suits, lots of high fives and silly grins, no drownings.
And then we pulled over to hand over our helmets. And pick up the toddler (remember her?)
The rest of the hours-long meandering journey, always spitting distance from the cars on I-70, was a bit more like an inner tube ride at Dorney Park and Wildwater Kingdom. All that was missing were the beers.
The family raft ahead cheerfully took photos of each other, moving around the raft to gather in smiling permutations. Except for the little girl, who had taken a nap. Yeah, it’s difficult to feel like a hard core rafter when there’s a toddler napping.
With not much else to do and a few hours of floating to kill, we all started telling stories of actual adventures we’d been on. Zach and Evan traded ever-escalating dangerous things they’d done – back country downhill skiing was merely a kicking off point. The guides – Jason, the Flyers fan trainee, and Prince William lavished us with stories of their hiking/climbing/rappelling/caving/diving exploits.
You should have seen their faces when I mentioned Aron Ralston.
Jason, it’s safe to say, is a bit of a fanboy. He itemized the incongruencies in “127 Hours” for us. (The cave diving scene is actually outside Salt Lake and not in Moab, UT? He’s been there. The filmmakers got that wrong. And he didn’t canyon dive with those girls either. But whatever. Hollywood.) “I went hiking in that part of the canyon in Utah because he left an epitaph scratched on it but I couldn’t find it. I almost did the same thing on his rock! Ha!”
Corporate lawyer, Richard, and Jon smiled blankly and went back to comparing how cold their hands were. Amy told us about a crazy cave tour she went on once on Halloween.
Another time, while on an ill-advised ice pick climb in Colorado, Jason had a guy latch on to him from the rear. “He had a pickaxe for an arm. It was that guy.” I have no idea whether he was totally lying to us, but the visual of Aron Ralston with a pickaxe arm is so great I want it to be true.
We mosied past the sulphur pools and a scorched out mountain to our eventual landing. We ate the NOVA provided hoagies, chips, cookies, and Gatorades through clattering teeth.
Just a bunch of formidable, badass whitewater rafters. As a thrilled and relieved Amy noted, “THIS WAS SO MUCH MORE HARD CORE THAN TENNESSEE.”
Right on.
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Activities: They offer a slew of whitewater rafting trips with escalating difficulties, our medium-to-easy hard trip was the Shoshone Rapids trip. There is a thrill-seeker section if you’re looking for something a bit more exciting.
They also have snowmobile tours in Winter, and ATV tours, Jeep tours, fishing, paintball, mountain biking, hiking, trout pond, and team building in the Summer.
Cost: Shoshone Rapids was $100 for Adults, $90 for ages 8-12, and $70 for ages 2-7.
How to Get There: NOVA Guides will pick you up, depending on your locale.
