My son and I along with some friends rafted 228 miles of the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon in July 1998. I'm on the far right in the top image. My best friend Richard is riding in the back. My son Alec is in the lower left corner. Another friend Paul is also in the front of the raft. We're being guided by a young woman that was really great. She really knew the river. It was a trip of a lifetime.
The middle image is an all-woman raft that really kicked ass the whole trip. Tough gals. It was incredibly hot (averaged 109 degrees each day) and sandy. We slept on sand bars along the side of the river each night. The heat trapped in the canyon during the day was absorbed by the walls and radiated back on to us all night. The river is about 57 degrees, much too cold and dangerous to go swimming. 
The trip was a long series of placid stretches of river puncuated by moments of sheer terror. At the end of the trip, my friend Richard and son Alec and I got a very bad case of food poisoning and had a nightmarish last night before we were all helicoptered to the north rim and were taken to Las Vegas, NV by small plane. It was actually the way everyone was scheduled to taken out of the canyon. We were just grateful that we got the food poisoning on the last day and did not have to recover while rafting the canyon. It was all a great adventure and I made some very good friends as well.
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