WEYBURN — Longtime Weyburn Rotary member Doug Loden shared photos and stories from his river rafting experiences at a club social evening, held Thursday at the Weyburn Legion.
As a former missionary in Africa, he has river-rafted on the Tana River in Kenya, the Nile River in Uganda, and on this continent, the Frazier River in B.C. and the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon in the United States, his most recent adventure.
The first trip was in Kenya, where he and his family lived for three years, and his son Stephen’s scout troop organized a river-rafting trip.
The trip began beneath a waterfall down the river, and Doug had a rough start, by getting pulled into the river three times in a row. He tried swimming out of the water each time, but it wasn’t until he stopped swimming that the river kicked him out of the churning swirl of water.
He later asked one of the instructors why he kept getting pulled into the water, and found it occurred when he put his paddle in to where the currents were strong. When he asked what he should do, he was advised that relaxing in the water to be kicked out by the churning current was the best action to take.
The second trip, on the Nile, was with three of his sons, Stephen, Andrew and Ryan. One difference was an amount of instruction on land prior to going into the water. As the guide, he watched to make sure the raft travelled the safest way down the river and through the rapids.
There were still some dangers on the water, one of them being a whirlpool – and two of his sons fell into it, Ryan for 10 seconds, and Andrew was under for about 30 seconds. They both came up out of the water all right and continued on.
With the rough rapids, at one point the rafter flipped over and he flew for a fair distance. The raft was able to pick up most of the passengers in the water nearby, but Doug had flown far enough that a chase kayak tracked him down and pulled him with a rope over to the raft.
He later asked his son Andrew what the experience was like, and was told the water just got darker and darker before it got lighter and lighter again.
Moving on to the Colorado River trip, which he took last May, Doug noted the First Nations people call the Grand Canyon the “upside-down mountain”.
“That’s a really good description,” he said. “Where we were, there were no roads, just amazing sights all the way.”
This is one of the few places where one can see 10 to 12 layers of rock, Doug noted, passing on some facts a geologist at the site told him. He asked why the gorge is so deep, compared to other old rivers that have no canyon, such as the Mississippi River. The geologist noted that the river had a steep descent which caused the river to rampage down and cut its way through the landscape for thousands and thousands of years.
They embarked down the Colorado River in two large rafts, put on by Wilderness River Adventures, each carrying about 14-15 people, with all supplies for the overnight stays tied securely down in the middle of each raft. There are big rapids on the river today, he added, but nothing like before the Glencairn dam and Hoover dam were put in to regulate the flow of the river.
Doug showed a brief video from the back of the raft, showing the water washing up over the passengers as it flew through the big waves.
For his part of the trip, there were three overnight stays, with the staff of the rafting company setting up to feed the passengers three times a day – including one evening when they were given a prime rib beef supper.
Doug and seven others left the trip to hike out on a 15-km uphill trail, the Bright Angel Trail. To help with the heat of the day, he soaked a wool shirt that he hung around his neck, and the let the moisture from it keep him cool for much of the climb up out of the Canyon. He said the climb took them up about a 5,000-foot elevation.
“I thought it was a very good idea,” he said of the water-soaked shirt. “I had no sense of it being warm.”
After seeing the video of the rafts hitting the rapids, he was asked if he was scared, and he said he had full confidence of being kept safe on the river. Doug added that once he found out just how cold the water was, he was determined not to be falling into it.
“I wasn’t worried,” said Doug. “I wouldn’t have wanted to go down in a small raft. Those rapids could tip a smaller raft so easily.
