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 (;