I was what you would call a non-traditional student. It was my second year in my second attempt at college, in my mid-twenties, studying adventure education at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado. An integral part of the program is the immersion semester consisting of three field trips. The third and final trip we did was a ten day San Juan River trip in canoes.
There we were camped a few miles upstream of Mexican hat on night four. We decided to pull two canoes into our camp and leave the other four hanging on a sand bar. In the morning my good buddy E wakes me up saying the canoes are gone. Those four canoes on the sand bar got floated downstream by a monsoonal rain surge brought down from the Animas River, a wild and free flowing tributary of the San Juan.
Those canoes had food for half the group for the remaining five days. This is potentially a trip ending event. Our resourceful and fearless leader, Tim Thomas, former Cataract Canyon raft guide, all around bad-ass, sets a plan in motion in the crucial next few hours. In the end he rents us a raft from a local company and we are able to not only continue our trip, but recover all our gear minus a sponge.
Since we had a big bucket boat now, we decided to put it to good use. Floating down the river, any time we saw trash we picked it up and put it on our new raft. From tires, to a Tonka Truck and propane bomb, we got what we could. We were able to turn an unfortunate event into a fortunate opportunity.
One moment that remains clear to me from the trip is from day six or seven when I asked Tim if I could row the boat. He told me first no, and then that if I wanted to row a boat that I should go to guide school. That following spring I signed up for a local companies guide school and became a raft guide. The spring after that, with one semester left to graduate, I decided to raft the Salt River in early spring.
Thank you Tim for telling me to go to guide school.