At the suggestion of our friends from WRCNU, Claudia and Ralph, Joel and I signed up for a 10-day river trip on the Green and Colorado Rivers with Holiday River Expeditions. Our only previous river rafting adventure (see photo below) was a short, partial day outing during our family reunion several years ago in Kalispell, MT. That trip was vastly different as the raft was large, seating 10 – 12 people and everyone had paddles. For our trip last week, we had smaller rafts with a guide and 2 – 4 clients and only the guide paddled.

The Green River through Labyrinth Canyon does not have any rapids and due to the low water typical for late season, we were able to take advantage of the Stand-Up Paddleboards and inflatable canoe they brought along. Sadly, for the guides, they had to paddle the entire length of this section of the trip (68 miles.) Plus they were up at 5:30am making coffee and breakfast, fed us amazing lunches and dinners complete with appetizers and then after clean-up, they got to stop working around 9:00pm. Huge effort on their part and we were duly impressed!

There were ancient cultural sites to enjoy as well as evidence of historical markers made by some of the early river runners. Our group was relatively small and consisted of several family members of the guides so it was a fairly close-knit group.

The first day we met at the Holiday River Expeditions office in Green River, UT. We took a very short, 5 minute, drive to the launch site at the Green River State Park and were on our way. En route to our campsite at Anvil Bottom we took a short hike to see some petroglyphs and visited Crystal Geyser. Our “mileage” this day was 18 miles.

The second day we entered Labyrinth Canyon and had lunch at Trin-Alcove and ended up camping near June’s Bottom for a total of 14 miles.

The third day saw us visiting the inscription of French Trapper Denis Julien and we camped across from the “Launch Marguerite” inscription after a journey of 15 miles.

Our last day for this segment of the trip traveled through Bowknot Bend to Mineral Bottom where we met our new “team” members for the second section – Cataract Canyon on the Colorado River. Along the way we had a nice hike up to the saddle of Bowknot Bend where we again saw inscriptions from previous travelers and had a great view of the river on either side.