Slow Moving Till The End

We have now been in Aniakchak for 7 days.  We are on the last leg of the rafting trip.  by tonight we will be on the Pacific Coast and we will be staying in the adminstration shack until we get picked up the next day. We only have eight nautical miles left to run.  It may not sound like much but since we are now past the running water the current has just about died and it is time to learn how to properly row a raft. 

It was finally my training day.  I was to be in control of the first raft in the morning.  My first two hours were spent more or less bumping and spinning off the banks of shore as I tried to learn how to control the craft.  I also had to learn how to choose where the in the river the main current was.  As there were many ways you could float but not all of them were floatable.  I finally gave up trying to tell how to guess at water depths and followed the experts.  That being a mother Harlequin and her chicks.  They seemed to know where the current and the deeper water was.  So when all else fails, follow the ducks.

We encounter our second bear.  We were downriver from him and parked on a sandbar having lunch.  He paid no attention to us as he was deeply engaged in catching fish from the river.  He never even noticed us as he scoured the river looking for an easy catch.  That is until he was down river from us, then he looked up and became quite frightened and ran full speed in the opposite direction.  Bears are so amusing.

It took pretty much all day to reach the ocean.  We had a cloudy day all day so you could not see very far.  Rowing became harder as the tide was coming in.  We had to exit the river and row up the coast to the beach where the shack was.  Luckily being it was high tide we didn't have as hard of time landing and unloading gear.  If we had arrived at low tide there would have been about 20 feet of beach to hike up to get the gear to safety.  None of us wanted that.  By the time gear was unloaded and we had moved what was need to the shack and supper ate it was quite late.  The rest of the crew went off for a hike that would take them to a dinosaur footprint preserved in the rock that my boss knew about.  It would be about a four mile hike on rocky terrain.  I decided to stay back as my ribs were quite sore from the hit I took the day before.  We had figured that I had probably cracked a rib as it hurt to take deep breaths.  So I rested and they went to explore.  Not a very exciting day but the scenery was awesome.