Taking a day off from either paddling or biking and not traveling I can finally sit down and write about my South Fork Salmon trip that I took. This is not going to be a write up running you through rapid by rapid because honestly, it is all kind of a blur. Instead, I will break the trip up into multiple posts and just recall the good times we all had.
This trip started with adventure far before ever reaching the river. Becca and I cruised across country in 3 days to meet up with her Portland crew in Banks, Idaho. Along the way to McCall, ID, we stopped to check out the North Fork Payette. Our timing was great because Alec Voorhees pulled up to Jacob’s Ladder and put on. I shot some video, we watched him make it look easy and we headed onto McCall. The plan was to eat in McCall and then head to Yellow Pine to camp out. Well, one of the cars got a flat and that changed things for us. Knowing how rough the shuttle is, we needed to get a new tire and not just use the spare. So that put us in McCall for the night so that we could wait for a tire shop to open the next morning. (BTW, this was July 4th).
Things happen for a reason because we stayed to watch the fireworks over the water in McCall and it was one of the most amazing firework displays I have seen. Thanks to my friend Walt (who lives in Boise), we got beta on some free camping and hung out there for the night.
The next morning we got up early, packed up camp and found a tire shop. Onto Yellow Pine! Upon arriving and only running on a couple hours of sleep, I didn’t join the rest of the group jumping into their kayaks. Instead, I outfitted my brand new kayak. When the rest of the crew got off the river, one of the guys had cracked his paddle. No good. I then put on the river just to test out the outfitting and I came back to camp with a cracked boat. Around the same time, one of the girls accidentally cut open her finger cleaning her knife. As you can see, many fun adventures far before ever starting the multi-day trip. If you are interested, you can check out my previous post on how we fixed the cracked boat. Stay tuned for more on the actual multi-day.
