White Water Rafting

Today Jesse and I did something for the first time ever, white water rafting!! I won a gift certificate at my work's Christmas party, and we decided to try it out. We headed down to Canon City, CO which is about an hour and a half south of where we live. It was a beautiful 85 degree day and not a cloud in the sky. We were very lucky with the weather because it has been really rainy this summer. They told us they raft in any weather, but I did not want to raft in pouring rain. That did not sound like fun to me. So we woke up bright and early and headed down to Echo Canyon Rafting Adventures. This is the view around the area.

We were very pleased with Echo Canyon and would recommend them to anyone! They had very nice accommodations. 

Everyone gearing up for rafting.

They even had yard games outside their restaurant. Yes!! My kind of thing!

 We are geared up and ready to go!

This is the bus we had to take to get to the "put-in" point of the river. They gave us a long speech on safety precautions if you happen to fall out of the raft. So much to remember, but I knew I just didn't want to fall out! haha. I would be afraid of hitting a rock.

Here we are on the bus, ready to go!

Serene.

Such a beautiful day, not a cloud in the sky.

This was the last picture before I had to put my phone away. We brought a zip-lock bag to keep our stuff dry. Smart!!

 This was a picture from the raft towards the end of the adventure. There are no rapids in this picture, obviously. During the rapids I was holding on tight. I did not want to fall out of the raft. There were a couple people in the raft behind us who fell out on the largest rapid we went over. We went on the Big Horn Sheep route which had class 2 & 3 rapids (class 5 is the highest). Jesse wanted class 4 rapids, but I was fine with 2 & 3 since it was our first time. I would maybe be more adventurous on my second trip. Our guide's name was Red, a college student from Denver who worked at Echo during the summers. He was awesome and kept our group laughing the whole time.

After we were done, they had hammocks for people to lay on while the guides loaded up the gear. It was very relaxing. We survived our first rafting trip!

After we got back to the lodge, we had lunch in their restaurant, 8 Mile. Boy did that beer taste good! At the bar, they were showing rafting wipe-out videos on the TV. Pretty much every raft flipped, people flew off, or got stuck. Crazy!! Good thing we didn't watch that before our rafting adventure.

Our guide recommended to our group that we go check out the Royal Gorge Bridge which was only 4 miles away from Echo. I have only visited the Royal Gorge when I was a kid, so it was nice to see it again. There was a major wildfire last year near the Gorge so the bridge was closed to the public, but there was still a viewing area that people could see the bridge from. The burn scar was so close to ruining the entire site!

Sort of hard to see from the pictures, but the gorge went down several thousand feet. 

There is the bridge if you look really close.

And there is the Arkansas river flowing through the Gorge. That's the river we rafted!

All in all we had a wonderful trip and we would definitely go white water rafting again!