Kayaking Archives - Susana Field

Low-water Run of the Yampa River, Part 5: The Art of Floating

October 16th, 2018susanafield0 Comments

Dear Reader, Once we got on the water (John and I each in an inflatable kayak and Cliff and Chayse running the raft) everything changed; the morning’s chaos washed away. The joy of floating The Joy of Floating We were floating. Self-contained. At one with the river and the currents and the breeze. Rocks and boulders slid beneath the shimmering water. Grasses swayed along the bank. We heard the smack of a beaver tail. Saw the flight of a heron. We moved slowly, and yet kept our eyes flashing left to right, up river and down, scanning for the shallows, …

Low-water Run of the Yampa River, Part 4: Running Low Water

October 15th, 2018susanafield0 Comments

Dear Reader, The river gauge on the Yampa would have read between 1000 and 2000 cfs (cubic feet per second moving past the gauge) on a normal late-June day. On this particular day, though, it read half that much, at 600 cfs. And it was dropping. The Only Ones on the River We were the only group at the put-in. Everyone else, who we normally would’ve had to share the river with, had canceled or been scared away. Even the shuttle company we’d hired to drive our vehicles from the put-in, in Colorado, to the take-out in Utah, had told …

Low-water Run of the Yampa River, Part 3: A Breakdown and a Put-In

October 14th, 2018susanafield0 Comments

Dear Reader, Our truck turned 200,000 miles, and in seeming celebration or revolt, it had its first ever major breakdown just an hour, of our 8-hr drive north from Cliff’s house, shy of the river put-in, in northern Colorado where our water tribe was waiting. The Breakdown The truck’s drive shaft completely fell off, in the middle of nowhere and as night quickly descended. Waiting for the tow trucks But most fortunately, as if the Gods, yes, wanted to mess with us but, no, not too badly, we broke down a few minutes before loosing cell service forever, and just …

Low-water Run of the Yampa River, Part 1: The River and the Water Tribe

October 12th, 2018susanafield0 Comments

Dear Reader, Before we could leave Colorado, and actually even before we could finish storing everything at our son’s home in Durango and head home to Nicaragua, we had one last thing on our to-do list: To run the Yampa River with our beloved water tribe. The Yampa River The Yampa River is a high mountain and desert river which begins in the Rocky Mountains above our old home of Steamboat Springs. It runs westward and free through northern Colorado until it flows into the Green River at Echo Park, near the border of Colorado and Utah. The Yampa, as …