MF Day 1, 6/10/2007: Launch Day!

In the morning, we woke up to a steady drizzle. In our favor, this seemed to slow down a lot of the other groups, so we ate a quick breakfast, and at 7:30 am got our "river ethics" speech and permit tags from the Ranger. At that point we were cleared to go. If we could get our boats in the water that is.

We kind of blew through the river ethics talk: CB and I used to be guides (albeit on a different stretch of the Salmon), so we knew the protocol. At the time I didn't know how inexperienced Backstroke and Bama were however.

In hindsight, we should have gone into more depth with the Ranger for their benefit: I don't like to tell people what to do (unless they're paying me) so I was somewhat uncomfortable later reminding them to dump partial cans of beer into the river instead of on the shore and things like that. The Ranger would have been more than happy to go over that stuff with them, and wouldn't have sounded like a pushy know-it-all like I'm sure I did.

We hustled back up to the campsite, threw all our camping stuff in the truck and drove back to the launch-site. We parked our truck at the top of the ramp, and one at a time carried our boats over.

One of the things we had noticed the day before watching the people who had gotten their boats in the water already, was how much crap they were having to carry down the long trail from the parking lot to the river. This seemed, how would you say... stupid. Or at least extremely inefficient. So instead...

On the first slope of the ramp, we quickly loaded each boat with a bunch of stuff in no particular order, just piling gear on it.

Then, one of us would get in the boat, and the others (using a belaying rope) would lower the loaded boat and rower down the ramp and into the river:

There was a small eddy a hundred feet or so past the main eddy, so we parked our boats there and secured our loads at our leisure. It would have been very difficult to carry our stuff down the trail to this lower eddy, but almost all our gear was already on the boats, thereby avoiding the mess at the main eddy.

And yes, we thought ourselves quite clever.

This is a looong ramp:
Next: Actually on the river.