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Rafting and Canoeing

Vance used to paddle the Guadaloupe River in Texas as a youth. There will never be pictures of any of these incidents associated with canoeing from bygone hippy days in the era before AIDS:

• Vance hitch-hiking across Texas to New Braunfels from Houston
• camping in the forest downstream from the dam at the head of the Guadaloupe
• losing a whole six pack the last time I will ever carry drinks in rapids in a styrofoam container
• making love in the sun on the boulders at the foot of one rapids with deer grazing on the opposite bank
• stopping off in Austin on the way home to tryst with a ballerina I used to know there
• wrapping the canoe inverted around two sides of a pier on a low bridge, stomping out the damage, and returning the canoe to the renter, claiming I'd just been for a paddle on the Brazos
• Actually doing the Brazos once (never again, pointless)

In his adult metamorphosis, Vance has rafted the Zambezi below Vic Falls in Zimbabwe (III to at least a IV+ the day I did it) and done a pretty neat river trip in Brazil near Rio (II to IV), but aside from a leisurely family raft trip with the Jack Doty family on our "drive to Hawaii" in Montana back in 1980 (I to II), this is something we've got into only recently as a family.

Here are some reports of more recent raft trips

• Rafting the Reventazón, August 10th, 1998 (rated III and was!)
• Rafting the Tully near Cairns, Australia, July 1998 (rated by Aussie exaggo-guides as being a grade IV but I'd give it a mostly III with an occasional III+)- http://www.geocities.com/TheTropics/Shores/3508/oz/rafting/
• Rafting the Trancura in Chile (grades II-III+) - http://www.geocities.com/TheTropics/Shores/3508/chile/chraftin.htm
• Rafting the Willamette in Oregon (grades I-II)
• Rafting in California (II's and III's)

Rafting websites

• Great Outdoors paddle page

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For comments, suggestions, or further information on this page, contact Vance Stevens, page author and webmaster.

Last updated: May 29, 1999