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Shiva organized this trip with Whitewater Connection of Coloma, California. The trip was June 24 and 25 2000, on the Upper Klamath, a Class 4 run. Shiva, Michelle, Lon, Becky, Adam, Mike and Sunah were in our group. Sherry, Kathryn and Stacy were guests we met. Sherry came with her dad for the third year in a row. Kathryn is a CPA in San Francisco and her sister Stacy goes to law school in LA. Kiernan was our goofy South African guide who we liked very much and Kyle was the lead guide on this trip. Our boat with Kiernan and the HC.com crew was the lead boat, so after we shot each rapid we turned back and watched the folks come after us. All the thumbnails on gray backgrounds are Adam's pictures which he was kind enough to let me link to here.
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We had a good time driving up to Weed with Michelle in her new Jetta. The most interesting luggage was Lon's. He had a black patent vinyl duffel with the logo of a martial arts studio on it. We ate at Lalo's, which some of us remembered fondly from other trips. When Michelle ordered a drink, she was carded! But this was such a great trip I think I may boldly speak for Michelle and say that wasn't even the highlight of the trip for her. Lon and I shared a room. He was very impressed with the Star Trek shower, just molded fiberglass but you didn't know if you would be soaped up or transported. Lon told me he didn't snore, and he was right, but while was asleep he did do SOMETHING; he told a little story about work in a tiny high voice, about building a video page with Karen G. for Frank S. This is what he is actually doing at work, and it is clearly a story that needs to be told.
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At seven in the morning we hopped into trucks and drove up to near Medford, where Adam is from. The guides were as they have been on every Western U.S. rafting trip I have been on, muscular Anglo-Saxon mountain men browned the color of turkey legs, mellow and jocular. I had a good time talking with Kyle about his family. He is the lucky kid in his family, the only one who still has hair, for example. I had the hat and swimsuit some friends gave me in England when they took me punting on the Cam for my birthday, so I already felt great in that gear, and I wore a wetsuit for the first time. I hadn't been on the upper Klamath for thirty years or so, but it looked just the way I left it. The upper Klamath is the site of an old lava spill. The vegetation is temperate-California style, no evergreens, big oaks, wildflowers, willows. It is rocky with porous jagged lava, but green. Lots of birds live there, bald eagles and osprey. Turtles live there, trout swim there, crawdads hang out, deer romp. It was lovely to be rafting, and the country was SO beautiful. We shot some little Class Ones and Twos and then we had lunch. Shiva had scouted campsites on her previous trip and we set up a camp in the spot she found. I wouldn't have picked it because it was rocky, but it turned out the rafting company gave us MATRESSES to sleep on. They were so cushy Lon put his on a big ol' jagged rock and baked in the sun like a lizard.
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After lunch we shot rapid after rapid, threes and fours. Three of them were named Caldera, Hell's Gate and Hell's Corner. We didn't row together perfectly in the morning but after lunch we were a well-oiled (sunblocked, really) machine. Our guide kept saying 'yeah, baby,' like Austin Powers, every time we did well at something tricky. He also liked to encourage us to 'high five' with our paddles. We had a great time. Then we drove back to our campsite. Mike had bought a folding two-person couch at REI. It was so cool. It had cup-holders in the arms. He hung out on it with Michelle. Adam caught a crawdad and waved it at me. Lon or Becky woke me up from my nap to tell me hors d'eouvres were ready. They were! Crudites and shrimp cocktail! When I came back up and told Michelle we had c-r-u-d-i-t-e-s she said, "you don't promounce any French words?" I said, "just the really important ones, like 'Michelle.'" She was delighted and poured me some Merlot, which was fantastic. Clearly Mike and Michelle are both oenophiles, and I was happy to notice that just as Becky and Adam arrived, because the three of us like to talk about words. Soon it was time for dinner, and then a campfire with s'mores. Mike and Adam each had a system for multiple marshmallow toasting, but I just couldn't eat one of those things after the good food and good wine.
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I like to sing an ancient filk song about programming. It is so old it refers to a teletype and to tape output. The chorus is the least fun part of the song, but the thing has to have a chorus. It goes,
"Programming, programming, all through the night.  We'll stay here until the whole program works right  Programming, programming, isn't it fun  The maintenance starts when debugging is done."   Becky says the song this tune comes from goes, "Do you remember sweet Betsy from Pike?  She crossed the wild prairie with her husband Ike,  two yoke of cattle, a black spotted hog,  a tall Shanghai rooster and an old yellow dog."			QMikeDines 386x656 50K
She says perhaps it is about the folks Pike's Peak is named after.
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A man who works for the rafting company came around with little bags of an herb with a name I completely forget, maybe Ik-Nish? that is some kind of wild celery he wanted to share with us. It smells fantastic. We had our own, HC.com, campfire. At our campfire, a darling fieldmouse ran into its nest, enchanting Becky. She tried to persuade it to come back by running after it, shining a bright Coleman lantern and pleading, Come back! Come back!, but unfortunately that strategy didn't work. In the morning we ran the same rapids we ran the day before. All together the first day we went 8 miles and the second day we went 14. I was determined not to slack off at all paddling behind Becky.
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We were a great team, but some of the other teams couldn't follow directions at all. Especially this one team that had a couple of sweetie-pies up at the front? They couldn't remember right from left and got stuck on a big rock at Hell's Corner. It was already kind of fraught as a rafter had just died there three weeks before, and Kyle's best friend had been the guide/paramedic who wasn't able to revive him. On our trip, then, the lovebird raft was stuck in the middle of this hellish rapid and our rafts were all docked while the guides tried to figure out how to rescue the folks. We were told to stay on our rafts. We didn't know what was happening. Then after about 15 minutes the guides asked the men from our rafts to come help them and the women to stay put. I am not sure what happened but the men had to walk through stinging nettles and pull very hard on ropes and eventually they rescued the people. Adam got an ugly cut on his leg. Unfortunately, soon we floated back over the state line to California and the day was over. Michelle drove Mike home, Becky and Adam drove home together, and Lon and I drove back with Shiva. I got the picture website done while we were driving home in order to thank Shiva quickly for organizing such a wonderful trip!
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