There was 12 of us that went on the trip and we had 6 canoes rented for us. We left Friday evening and hit major traffic, after 3 hours we had only gone 80-90 miles...Eventually we got to the campsite around 10pm. We were camping Friday night at Park Moabi near Needles, CA at the start of the canoe trip. We had a campsite right on the Colorado River. Even though we all got there after dark, Ryan and Savitri were even later, they were on "Savitri Time" and got to the campsite at about 12:15am! We will have more pictures on the blog once people send us theirs, this is all we had on our camera, here we are at the campsite in the morning before we started our canoeing:
It was very cool at night, but the weather on Saturday was absolutely perfect, it was completely sunny, light winds, and about 80-85 degrees. We had a 17 mile trip that day so the canoe outfitter had to start us at 7am, right after the sun came up. At the start of the trip the river goes through the desert, then about 5 miles later we paddled through red-ish brown cliffs in Topock Gorge. The water in the river was cool, but we still swam in the river and we even jumped off some rocks about 15 feet over the river.
We were supposed to meet our rafting outfitter at the take-out point at 3:30pm. Colleen and Jim were the only canoe to arrive on time as the group started getting split up near the end. (We had to turn off the main river channel into a side channel, and then turn off into a small bay where the take-out point was.) When the other 10 people didn't show up, Jim paddled back out into the side channel and river looking for the group while Colleen waited at the take out point. After 1.5 hours of looking for everybody else--just as the sun was dropping behind the horizon--Jim found the others they off on a wrong dead-end side canyon and guided them to the correct take-out point just as it was getting dark! If it had been just 10 or 15 minutes later it would have been completely dark out and cold (the temperature drops quickly in the desert after dark, it very quickly drops down into the 40s at night!) and the other 10 people would have had a miserable night cold and without food!We got back to the campsite and made dinner by our fire by the river. We had turkey dogs, sweet potatoes, portabello mushrooms, dorritos, chocolate brownies, it was quite a feast! We then played a 2-3 hour game of Catch Phrase. In fact after we went to bed we could hear others in our group still playing it by the fire! In the middle of the night, at about 3 or 4 am, a windstorm starting blowing through the desert and shook the tent so much that we couldn't sleep anymore. It felt like an earthquake because it was shaking our tent so much! As soon as it was light out, we all got up, quickly packed up and headed out. We had plans to make a huge breakfast at the campsite but the wind was way to strong and blowing sand everywhere. We headed to a good down-home breakfast at The Wagon Wheel restaurant in Needles before our drive back to San Diego!
We are back now, showered, in our PJ's and exhausted and it is not even 7pm yet! It will be an early night for us!
So much fun- what a canoe trip that was though! Don't forget the accident on the way hame too where they had to shut down the freeway and divert us to a side road. Thanks for orgazing this Jim and Colleen!
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