Tag Archive for: rafting

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Bridge Jumping

Honorable Mention: Student Story

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Happy screams filled the air as we rafted over eight-foot waves and six-foot drops. The White Salmon River of Washington flowed clear and blue around us, splashing me with the occasional tidal wave. Even though it was a mid-July afternoon, the water temperature hovered around a refreshing forty degrees. I was at Adventure Treks summer camp on our last full day together. Over the course of the past fifteen days, I’d made seventeen new best friends and done some amazing things, such as backpacking for miles along the Olympic coast and scampering up tall granite cliffs in Icicle Canyon. Our rafting trip down the White Salmon was the grand finale – everyone was happy to have a fun break, as we’d just come down from climbing to the summit of Mt. St. Helens the day before. I’d been having a fantastic time all day, but the experience was tinged with sadness – the next day, our entire group would be at Portland International Airport, flying back home.
After plummeting down a small waterfall, Seabass, one of our instructors, yelled, “Forward!” Read more

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Strangers.

Honorable Mention: Student Story

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There’s a funny thing about strangers: they don’t leave when you want them to, especially when you’re stuck with 23 of them for 16 days, with nothing to look forward to except hiking five miles up a snow-covered volcano. As it turns out, Mount St. Helens doesn’t leave when you want it to, either.
“What is hard to endure is sweet to recall.” This French proverb certainly held true during and after my Washington expedition over the summer. The summit of Mount St. Helens wasn’t the only hardship endured on this trip. Rocks, as they did on the mountain, presented a challenge on our four-day backpacking trip along the beaches of the Olympic Peninsula; I slipped multiple times on their slimy saltwater coating, and I soon tired of the sharp angles underfoot. I had never before hiked with a full, heavy, external-frame backpack, which cut into my shoulders and back with every step, leaving visible bruises. The tides, also, were quite an intimidating, unchanging force. We had to time the legs of our journey to make our tide points, but, despite our best efforts, sometimes high water blocked our path.
There were many more hardships to come: next we sea kayaked in the cold Puget Sound waters, which topped out at 48o. The cold and the wet, the main hindrances on this part of the trip, numbed my fingers so that fastening the skirt around the lip of the cockpit was difficult, and left me shivering for long afterwards.
But as we sweated through the hot, dry, desert-like climate of central Washington, rock-climbing and river-rafting, the prior experience seemed like it would be quite welcome. I desperately gripped the sheer rock wall with my hands and feet, but knew that my exceedingly tight-fitting shoes and harness were supporting me. When rafting the Wenatchee River, I faced a new challenge: Read more

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