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 (;