Rafting the yellowstone!

My friend Ben and I spent the weekend in Gardiner, Montana, the northern entrance to yellowstone national park. Its about a 6 hour drive (8 hours with rush hour traffic, we learned). One of Ben's skier friends (NCAA all-american) is a guide with Montana Whitewater in gardiner, so we stayed in his trailer with a bunch of other raft guides. We got to ride for free! We rode a "mini-me" which is a small 8 foot dinghy, an inflatable kyak called a duckie, and a regular raft on the more technical rapids. I got to go for a swim on the first ride. Kevin, our guide, accidently took us into whats called an eddy drift. They're little currents off to the side of big rivers that flow opposite to the flow of the river, so we just stopped right in our tracks, I was unprepared and thrown off the raft. It really wasn't as bad as it sounds, we pulled over to let the bigger raft pass us. It was still a bit shocking. What a rush, though. Its always amazing to watch the water raging down those big rivers in the mountains. I've always thought rafting was about flying down the river and trying to avoid rocks. Thats part of it, but not all the water flows straight down the river. Sometimes you need to power through waves, sometimes you need to take the appropriate "line" through or around rapids. Its a lot of fun! I've decided I'd like to move to montana, too :) .

Love you guys!

-Walter B.