A family flotilla

When you’re invited to go on the San Juan, the answer is always YES. In fact it just rarely ever happens that one would say no. Because inevitably, you’ve been trying to get a permit for 8 years in a row and damn if your neighbor gets drawn on her second year of trying for one of the most coveted weekends of the season. Even when it was just 4 days since your last camping trip. Even though you don’t actually even have a raft, or pfds or paddles or fire pan or gruver (what ever the heck that is) or a floating kitchen and even though you have a flight to Boston twelve hours after you’re supposed to get home from said floating trip, that is if you survive the rapids, don’t get giardia and you don’t miss the takeout. Yes of course. YES! We can go float the San Juan River. Count us in. What time are we leaving?We rented a raft and all of the appropriate gear, planned meals and with two other families set off for the permitted float between Bluff and Mexican Hat, UT. The put in is about 2.5 hours drive from Durango, really close to where we spent Easter. We had 3 rafts, 3 families, 6 adults and 6 kids, and spent two nights, 3 days floating around 30 miles through the dessert southwest.

A little lazy with setting up tents and 0% chance of rain (ZERO PERCENT), we decided to leave the good tents at home and bring only one tent just in case of bugs. The one with the busted rain fly. The plan was to sleep on the beach with the scorpions and rattle snakes under the stars which sounded pretty awesome to me except for the snakes and scorpions.

Within the first hour, we managed to get into a tricky position with our raft that almost put me over the edge both literally and figuratively. Not 10 min later a squall that we had been watching and hoping would sweep around us to the east began unloading torrential rain. For fear of lightening strikes (we could actually feel the electricity in the air and smell the ozone), we pulled over, tied the boats and ran to get away from the few trees along the river bank to a wide open flat spot and hunker down until it passed. All 12 of us huddled for nearly 20 minutes under a tarp with some of the loudest lightening I’ve ever heard popping around us and with not only rain but hail pelting down. Bone dry dessert turns to sticky impassible mud in heavy rain and we squished back to our boats nearly losing our shoes and the kids, pretty much drenched and covered in it. There was so much rain that our 5 gallon bucket had about 3 inches of water in it and you could see the pour off of flash flooding coming down the canyon walls in places.

The Skowlund raft outrunning the storm. 

0% chance of rain

The dreaded 90 degree turn

But it’s the dessert and it only took 15 min to dry out and not a single rain cloud was seen again the entire time. The river was really high so we moved super fast on our route, camping along the river banks. The tarp was a lifesaver and worked pretty hard all weekend. It saved us from the hail, shaded us from the sun and  gave us a nice clean place to sleep at night. If you ever go on an overnight river rafting trip, it’s likely second to a pocket knife in terms of preparedness.

The rest of our time was pretty relaxed. The highlights were hiking to the River House ruins, finding a swimming hole on the second night and the gruver with a view and Suzanne’s river margaritas! (The secret ingredient is cheap beer! Don’t tell her I told you.) A fantastic family floating weekend.