Catching Up

Hello everyone!

I have been pretty faithful to the Twitter feed at the bottom of the blog but actual posts are a challenge without a keyboard...

Seamus and I are in Memphis for the weekend, and last weekend we were in St Louis. We got scooped out of the Missouri River in St Charles and spent four days with my Uncle Les, Aunt Julie, and cousin Joel. Great people... Lots of good conversation and quite a bit of great food. We were able to run many errands to fix some issues. Seamus' boat was taking on a little water, so his feet were soaking in Missouri River water... A little on the nasty side. So we went to west marine products and got the appropriate stuff to fix the holes. We also needed to mail a big box of stuff back to Colorado. We had two portage carts but we really only need one. We also sent back the water boots in which Seamus' feet were marinating.  We had a couple electrical problems that we solved at the coolest electronics store we've ever been to.  The place is called micro center: http://www.microcenter.com. They had everything one might want to build their own computer from scratch... Another hobby of ours. We also resupplied our food and I posted a couple videos (see below). We celebrated Joel's birthday, drank lots of good coffee, took many showers, flew an r/c quad copter around the cul de sac. 

Then we headed back to the boat ramp and we headed for the confluence with the Mississippi and then the Chain of Rocks and then the Arch (not a parabola, if you care). 

Saturday night we had a beautiful camp.

Next morning we paddled into Cape Girardeau and went to St Vincent's for Mass. It was such a nice town we stayed an extra day, did some laundry, are some good food, etc. We saw a huge river boat there.  

On down to meet my brother Charles, my sister-in-law Ashley, and my God-children Clare and Peter in Memphis. The only exceptional event that week was The Great Attack of the Asian Carp.... We camped on a sand bar across from the main channel just down from New Madrid. As we were paddling away from camp through the shallow water between sandbars the water would suddenly explode with heavy, yet fast fish jumping through the air. Perhaps you've seen the video I posted on Twitter... Those guys were several feet above the fish and going much faster... We spent 15 minutes ducking and paddling through their territory... It would take the slightest dip of a paddle and the water would boil with them. They jumped over our boats but did not jump into them, thankfully. One jumped into my hand and it felt like I slammed my hand in a door. Surreal. 

Finally we got to Memphis and met up with the family... They drove for days to meet us and are, as I write, driving back... We had some BBQ at a really good BBQ joint. I recommend the Memphis style pulled pork sandwich. This morning we said our good byes on Mud Island and now we're set on getting to Vicksburg by next weekend.  

Links to a couple more videos

http://youtu.be/TGIkUOA9VX4
http://youtu.be/cQxeMBFcaDA

First day video

We're spending the weekend at a Benedictine abbey guesthouse in Atchison, Kansas. http://www.kansasmonks.org/ They have been in Atchison for 157 years and they currently have about 40 monks living at the abbey with another 10 at a mission in Brazil.  They run a college (Benedictine College) here and they have lots of young monastics here, the abbot is only 43! They let us do laundry and they gave us a tour of the town - Amelia Mary Earhart was born here, and Lewis and Clark stopped here.  They have numerous streets paved with bricks, which is nifty, and many old, cool houses. 

Big Portage...

Happy Fathers Day!

We're in Nebraska!

Seamus and I had a rough day on Tuesday. We were tree kayaking all day. Tree kayaking is similar to tree skiing in that one must avoid the trees but with skiing you can stop almost anytime... Kayaking in trees only happens in flooded rivers (like the Cache la Poudre) and our long touring kayaks are not suited to the quick turns needed to navigate such conditions. So after a long and scary day of swimming in 33 degree snowmelt, rescuing kayaks, and saving each other, we got a motel in Greeley and ordered a pizza...

We wanted to save the adventure but both of us were unwilling to get back into the Poudre. We consulted an expert and decided to do a vehicle aided portage around the sketchy flooded parts of the river. We decided we'd like to go kayaking again some day so I called about renting a car and discovered that renting a car in Greeley one way to North Platte or Grand Island would be costly.... But one way between airports is cheap so we opted to portage to Omaha in a black Hyundai. My brother and his wife and their wolf puppy rescued us in Greeley, drove us to DIA and now we're in Bellevue, Nebraska... The home of Strategic Air Command at Offat Air Force Bas and Our Lady of the Runways at St Mary's Catholic Church. 

Tomorrow we start down the river again, looks very promising. 

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USGS Map

This is a post to outline how I *think* this trip will go:


I imagine we will get up fairly early on Tuesday the 10th of June; the Cache la Poudre river will be running a bit high but will look good. We'll put in at Prospect Road (see map below). A few friends in a canoe will put in with us and we'll paddle along with the occasional portage around diversion structures and other obstacles until we get to their car in the afternoon... then we'll say good-bye to them and start looking for a place to sleep for the night. We'll continue the pattern of getting up before sunrise and paddling all day until Saturday afternoons. On Saturdays we'll stop at a town and take Saturday afternoon and Sunday off to go to Mass, wash clothes and recharge batteries and maybe find a library to upload video files and, of course, resupply food.

Towards the beginning of the trip we need to keep the load pretty light because the river is wide and shallow. I read the account of another Fort Collins resident (http://www.raftmwd.com/about-us/about-the-owner/) who did this trip with his brother in a canoe, several years ago. He mentions that they ran out of water in North Platte Nebraska because they divert most of the water for agriculture in North Platte (check out a map https://www.google.com/maps/place/North+Platte,+NE)... I think that we'll be in pretty good shape for a couple reasons: first, we have received a tremendous amount of rain last fall, snow this winter, and more rain this spring... so all the irrigation reservoirs are probably full and the farmers aren't using as much irrigation water as they might in a dry-er year. Second, we're in kayaks rather than a canoe so we sit higher in the water than a canoe does. We'll be a bit faster in kayaks, we even rigged our kayaks with little sails so with a breeze we'll be cruising.

We are committed to ensuring this is an adventure that we never forget... that could mean many things but for us it means that we have left an uncomfortable number of possibilities and contingencies unplanned and abandoned to Providence... The Colorado state motto is "Nil sine Numine" - Nothing Without Providence... thus we have not scouted the entire river route by car, we have not contacted authorities in North Platte to verify our speculation about reservoirs and irrigation usage. We haven't planned all our campsites and mapped out libraries, churches, laundromats, motels, grocery stores, or anything else... We do have several iPhone apps that appear to cover these needs. Two apps that collect USGS data on river levels, one app that knows where all the wifi is, one starbucks app (not bringing coffee in the kayaks), gps apps, twitter and blogger apps, et cetera...

Things we are prepared for: walking from North Platte to Omaha dragging kayaks behind us, caffeine headaches, frequent attacks by raccoons and mosquitos, caffeine headaches, paddling in polluted waters, asking strangers for help... this last one being the most uncomfortable for me.

We aren't completely ignorant of reality... we have read numerous blogs about people doing similar adventures, this is a good one : http://www.portagetoportage.com/index.html... I learned a lot from that blog and I hope that we can appear half as organized as him.

I imagine I will laugh at this post in its profound ignorance in a few months... and that's why I wrote it (;

Zak and Seamus