Its a cold morning in December as I drive to my friends house to meet up with the gang running the Gunnison river today. I remember thinking, "at least I didn't have to scrape ice off the windshield or anything" as I drove over. Thoughts of whether or not this trip was a good idea were already needling their way into my mind. As I pull up, Robby and Logan are crossing the road a good ways ahead of me. They make it into Robby's house before I can park, but I walk in just on their heels.

 

     "Knock knock…" I say as I walk into the landing of Robby's split level. I'm almost certain I just saw them walk in, how deep into the house could they be? "Hellooo?" I drawl out, in an evidently too loud voice. Logan and Robbie's heads pop over the banister above me and they both signal me to be quiet. Oh, right. Robby's got two young daughters. I mouth the word sorry, but the two have already turned and headed back into the kitchen. Climbing the stairs, I follow them to the kitchen table and we huddle around the open laptop there.

 

"It's a bit chilly out there," I say in a much more controlled volume.

 

"Yeah, its 'We may not be going at all' cold" Logan replied flatly.

 

     This draws me into the info Robby is trying to get going on the computer in front of him. River data is pretty accessible in this day and age, but it has always been a bit greek to me, despite how many river hours I've got under my belt. I'm seldom the trip leader, and this portion of the planning doesn’t often fall to me. He's trying to see what the water temps have been the past couple days, and especially the nights on the particular stretch of river we're planning on running.

 

     "We were checking out the river," Logan says, motioning his head out the front door and across the street to the Colorado river that runs through town. "Its pretty icy. I'm worried about ice-dams on the Gunnison."

 

     So that's why they were crossing the road back to the house earlier, they must have been looking at the river. Ice dams? That sounds like something terrible to encounter in an inflatable boat. I'm picturing razor sharp, fractured ice that the river is unrelentingly pushing all that floats into it. Slicing ice aside, it might just make large sections un-runable… maybe even solid. I'm from Georgia. What do I know about ice?

 

     After a bit of Robby clicking around on the laptop, Logan is actually able to find the right bit of info we need on his phone. "Ok, here is the Gunny stretch… it hit freezing, but not long or often." Logan informs us and then shows the screen to Robby. Perhaps he knows or can sense my lack of expertise with this data. Maybe he just doesn't like me much. We've been on a couple big group rafting trips together, but he's probably the one of our little gang I'm least close with. His deadpan humor is hilarious and lightning quick, but a bit hard for me to read. So, naturally I should assume he hates me, right?

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     "Well, that means there shouldn't be ice. On the Colorado, the temperatures never change from 32 degrees, but the Gunnison is fluctuation from 32 to 38 and is dam fed. It is worth taking a look don't you think?" Robby questions the room, just as my phone buzzes to life in my pocket. My friend Chris must be here. I duck down to the front door as those two discuss thermodynamics a bit. By the time I've welcomed Chris in and head back up with him, they've decided that the trip isn't a total no-go. We agree to load up and head down to the take out and assess the river (and our plan) from there.

 

     Loading the gear into the bed of Logan's truck, I'm a little surprised by how much there is. I trust these guys to make reasonable gear decisions, even if they may have a tendency to over pack on occasion. Its not the personal gear, from what I can tell, that is taking up so much space. Its Robby's boat. Exactly why he's taking a 12.5ft Sotar Legend Cataraft on a single day trip that requires a mile and a half long hike down into the canyon to get started, I don't know. But again, I do trust his judgement when it comes to the river. We cap off the pile of rolled up rubber and roll top dry bags in the truck bed with the square metal frame that will span the gap between Robby's boat tubes and serve as his cockpit once it's all lashed together. “I know it looks crazy,” Robby said, “but I can carry extra gear and if you guys get in trouble, I can haul you out.” These words almost seem prophetic to me now.

 

     Chris and I load up in his little car, and the other two hop into Logan's truck. The plan is to head down to the take out at Pleasure Park and drop Chris’ car. That is, if the river looks like liquid, and I there aren't any Icebergs. We will then pile into the truck and head to the "top", otherwise known as the Chukar trail. From there, we will begin the hard haul to bring all the gear down and have one final chance to reassess if the river looks passable. I half conned Chris into his part of all this. He's "running shuttle" for us. This is essentially just getting a car at the take out that we can put all the gear in and head directly home. In this case, it'll be Logan's truck. That requires him to take the truck back to the take out and reclaim his own car before heading home. He's also agreed to help carry gear down to the river. We're paying him pretty well for this service, as its more than just a buddie lending a favor sort of situation. I do still feel bad for how it all played out for him.

 

     Speaking of feeling bad, at this point I have no idea that Logan is feeling a bit nauseous as we leave town. He may not have even said anything to Robby yet.

 

     We get to the Pleasure park take out without incident, just a quick stop at a gas station. The river looks good here. No signs of ice other than just upriver from the take out where another river joins in. It doesn't take much discussion for us to head on up to the next leg of the journey to get this started. We can always bail from the put in if it's bad when we get there. It sure would suck to carry it all back up and out of the canyon… but we could.

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     With all four of us in the truck, we head along down the road a bit further, making questionable jokes about four dudes going on a trip to "pleasure park". Finding the right turns take a little bit of work, now that we're on dirt roads. With some assistance from the overhead view of google maps, we're doing well and it doesn't slow us down too much. At one point, however, Logan pulls over shortly after making a turn and hops out. Hmm, Robby mentions that his stomach is a bit upset. I get a little motion sick if I'm not driving, or if I'm reading while riding in a car… but he's driving. The little break doesn't take long and we get back underway. Shortly thereafter we get to the climbing portion of the drive as we approach the rough, 4-wheel drive descent to the trailhead. Just before the "road" drops, Logan hops out again and proceeds to mark some cacti as his, with a smattering of stomach contents. Guess it's worse than I thought.

 

Robby and I share a quick look between us. I took it to mean, "we may not be going after all".

 

As our driver climbs back in, he says something along the lines of "well, that tree will forever be etched in my memory." We offer up that we can always turn around and head home if he's feeling like crap. 

 

"No. As these things tend to go, I feel much better after throwing up. Now, how long that feeling will last is the question." We push on.  

 

     The road is much rougher on the descent, and requires some slow going. Logan is still hanging in there, despite the bouncing of the cab as we crawl along. Once at the trailhead, we lug all the gear out of the back and onto a stone bench of sorts, in order to take inventory and decide what's going and what's staying. We've got a couple frame-packs (think old, external frame backpack with no backpack on it) in order to lash the large rolls of rubber and huge dry bags to. One of them has all of Robby's raft- two 12.5 foot deflated rubber tubes in a big roll around his 3 oars, which are sticking straight up in the air. The third ore is a spare, in-case one of them breaks or is lost, and Robby has broken an ore before. We never would have imagined how we would end up using it. Another frame pack gets Logan's "ducky", or inflatable kayak.. The last one gets Robby’s huge dry bag and Logan’s smaller but not small dry bag, lashed side by side. We call this pack the "double barrel". The fourth pack is my hiking bag that I recently used to hike a 6-month long trip along the Continental Divide trail. It contains all of my gear, along with the packraft I've borrowed for this trip. It is the lightest of the packs, mainly just because the boat is designed for carrying.

 

     It's precisely because of my 6 months spent hiking that we are even here. I missed the whole river season while playing in the mountains, and at a small bonfire gathering at Robby's I mentioned how much I'd love to squeeze one more trip in if were possible. Robby, never one to turn down a chance to get on the water, did all the hard work organizing it from there. So, as a small thank you to him, as well as because I just spent all summer conditioning my body to carry heavy objects on my back, I carry the big (roughly 100 pound) beast that is his boat's pack. Logan and Robby carried the frame.

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     Chris ends up with ol' double barrel, which couldn't have been much lighter than mine. Poor dude just thought he was running some cars around. Logan actually started with the frame, but I relieved him of it when he was showing some signs of struggling. He headed on at a much faster pace than Chris and I could muster, and pretty quickly Robby switched packs with Chris and scuttled off after him in order to drop the double wide and come back to take Chris's spot carrying the frame. After a bit of rough trail with a few sketchy ice patches, along with plenty of grunting and groaning, we all make it down to the put in. Thankfully, the water is perfectly ice free. There is a somewhat angry looking rapid right there however, rumbling as we start setting up the boats.

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     With his head start, Logan had his boat mostly inflated. He looked worn out, sitting next to it and slowly pumping the last bits of air into it via a very "ACME dynamite plunger" looking hand pump that lives at the put in there. I didn't think much of it, as I'm typically worn out after pumping up a tube or a boat. That takes some work. I found out later, his post puke rally was well over at this point.

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     Busying myself with getting Robby and I set up and changing into my river gear so that Chris can start his return journey, I again was oblivious to Logan's struggle to get his drysuit on. At this point, Logan looks paler than the snow/ice we crossed on the trail. Robby asked Logan if he was going to make it.

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“Well, I am going to start in the ducky, but I probably will in end up in the back of your boat.”

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“If, you can’t do it, I know we said we would bail if anyone wanted to back out, but we’ll take you gear down and meet you at the house.” We knew this wasn’t the best idea, but hauling 400 pounds of gear back to the car with Logan out of commission looked like a daunting task.

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     Not that drysuits are ever easy to put on, but evidently Logan needed to sit down and rest about halfway through. Once I've dressed out and Robby is working on the last of his lashing straps that hold his frame to its tubes, Logan declared his decision. He's not going to be able to run the river.

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Damn.

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     He was really looking forward to this trip too. He's already put in all the effort. Done all the hard stuff. Its not a great idea for us to only have had three boats, just for safety sake. Now we're down to two. If we go at all. Should we still go?

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     I've wondered about this moment quite a lot since that day. Did we decide to keep going just because it would have been so difficult to haul all the gear back out? Did I just want a day on the water that bad? Did Robby? Did we ultimately decide it was safe enough, or did we ignore the dangers? I even had those "swiss cheese" models of disaster pop into my head from my annual mandatory safety trainings from working on the flight team at my hospital. They illustrate a model of a bunch of small things linking into a dire emergency. Perhaps we both felt something else telling us to go. Something bigger than us urging us or coaxing us not to worry about it. Regardless, we decide we're still doing it.

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     We've got enough room on the Cataraft to haul all the gear, saving Chris and Logan anymore pain on the hike out. We lash two of the frame packs along the raft's frame, behind the captain's seat. This offers us a place to pile and secure Logan's boat, large dry bag and Robby's drybag. Logan, in his infinite wisdom gives us a quick run down of what is in his pack. I say "infinite wisdom" in all seriousness. He is a damn smart guy, and I'm very thankful that he took the time to mention what all was in there, and where. Interestingly, I listened more intently than one typically would. I didn't give it the cursory ear that people do with the pre-flight safety briefing (even though it's regarding how to escape the flaming death heap of a crash, should you need to). Another thing to be thankful for.

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     Goodbyes handled, half of the gang begins their hike out and we head to our boats. A group of fishermen (with one fisherwoman) ask us a couple questions, somewhat incredulously, about our trip. We are anxiously checking our watches at this point, as we were on a bit of a tight schedule before the collection of small delays that the morning has held. We had planned on launching by 11:00 and it was past 12:30! Either they sense this or decide that no amount of further questioning will allow them to better understand why we are going on the river in the middle of December, and they hike on.

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     Finally! Let’s push off and get this thing started!

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