We caravanned from our RV park to one of the several companies that provide outdoor adventures in Moab. Tag-A-Long Expeditions are well known in the area and have some of the best River Guides around. After being fitted for a life jacket, we all load up in a very old school bus. I think that the seats were actually closer together than when it was a school bus to get more people in at one time - there wasn’t even room for a 2nd grader to sit comfortably! In any case, with a full bus we head up along the Colorado River about 15-20 road miles to the point where our trip on the river will begin. We will be rafting only about 6-7 “River miles” to the point where they will retrieve us and bring us back into town. As we travel, we are told that this trip is classified as a “float” trip and that we will experience a couple Class-1 rapids and maybe one Class-2 rapids. Now, that meant nothing more to me than it didn’t sound like a “float” trip anymore! I was rethinking my decision, but it was too late to change now. We were divided up and assigned a boat and captain. Andy and I were lucky to get Pat as our captain and as he told us of his experience I felt much better. He normally does trips with Class-5 rapids - the worst ones they classify!
The picture above was taken from their web site. It is a pretty good example of our boat and the worst of the rapids we encountered. The water was cold and some of us got very wet. Andy got soaked a couple times, but I was lucky and only got my feet wet! I think the Gods were watching over me. About half way in the trip, we pulled into shore on a sandy beach for lunch. We had 5 boats in all making the trip together, with each boat having 11 passengers. Only the captain rowed and the rest of us just held on and enjoyed the scenery and fun. Once we were all safely on the shore, the 5 captains got busy immediately making lunch for us from scratch! It was amazing. First they set up some tables and put out big jugs of water for us. They proceeded by cutting up assorted fresh fruit and passed it around. Then came some chips to hold us over until they finished the main course, a wonderful Mexican Salad in Tortilla "cones". Everything was ready in just 15 minutes - they were really busy beavers! This was a really ingenious and delicious lunch - I am sure that Adventure Caravan's will adopt this idea real soon! The recipe can be found on the Tag-A-Long website. Our Guides chopped up Tomato, Green Onions, and Avocado. They added cans of corn, kidney beans, and sliced black olives. To all that they added shredded cheese and crushed tortilla chips and mixed it all together with a dressing made with Salsa, Garlic Powder, Lemon Juice, and Sour Cream. This is the ingenious part - they took a large flavored tortilla (I am sure regular flour tortillas would work just as well) and folded it into a cup/cone shape and filled it with the mixture they had created. We ate it like a large ice cream cone! No trash to cart back on the boats!!!! Paper water cups was all the trash - except for the empty cans and dirty dishes that went back into the coolers they came in. There was plenty for seconds and we were all very satisfied after finishing.
Check out http://www.tagalong.com/ for the recipe and more information.
We loaded back up into the boats and continued on down the river. After arriving back at our starting point, we turned in our life jackets and were surprised with Popsicles to cool us off.
For a “Float Trip”, these guides had to work really hard to get us down the river and around the rocks and rapids. We were told that the river at this time of the year normally runs about 3000 cubic feet per minute. Today it was running closer to 5000 cubic feet per minute - that is what caused the one rapid to be a Class-2! In any case our River Guide was rowing most all the way to keep us out of trouble. We had an absolutely wonderful day!!! After returning to the RV park, we had our travel brief for the next day - and then called it a night. What a day!
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