The folks at American Whitewater have been kind enough to indulge me by publishing a series of articles about packrafting in their 2020 issues. As a result, there’s no doubt that both of the people who read the articles are charging out and buying packrafts as we speak! According to the editor of the magazine I’ve said all there is to be said (he clearly doesn’t know me very well!) and this will be the…
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This year the editor of the venerable American Whitewater Journal has been kind enough to indulge me (and the rest of the vast packraft world?) by letting me write a series of articles about packrafting. It’s been a really fun project so far. The first introductory/history article is here, and the second (using the River of Return trip as an example of what a packrafting trip can be) is here (starting on page 24). The…
1 CommentAfter 25 or 30 miles of mostly shuffling on our skis through the Absaroka mountains (and occasionally actually “skiing!” it was a treat to be in our boats floating along. We purposely put in on Thorofare Creek where the gradient backed off dramatically; like a lot of drainages in the intermountain West it was pretty continuous and not too difficult, but there were a lot of blind corners and -again, like many intermountain creeks –…
Leave a CommentWhen Jeff Creamer sends you an email titled “potential routes” you gotta sort of prepare yourself for it. As the most prolific packrafter in the lower 48 he’s seemingly “done it all,” from mild to wild, but applying his PhD science level mind to linking up squiggly blue lines on maps never ceases to come up with creative new adventures. After deciding that winter in southern Colorado should not be a deterrent to packrafting, he…
3 CommentsIn the posts about my mom Ginny Diegel I talked about how much she loved the Wallowa Mountains in northeast Oregon; indeed, for an Oregonian, it’s a “real” mountain range. Not that the Cascades is not a range, but with craggy peaks and jagged ridges, deep valleys, rivers, and pristine mountain lakes the Wallowas offer a lot of alpine bang once you make the long entrance into them. They are known as the “American Alps,”…
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