Trippin with Stanley

After a great time in Colorado Springs we packed up Stanley and headed to Cañon (pronounced Canyon) City. We arrived at what appeared to be a run down parking lot, but was in fact the RV park we had booked. There was a range of campers from Class A buses that were past their prime and broken down trucks that had simply set up a tent and a tarp. We were informed that most of the residents lived there term and we were more than a little nervous about being the outsiders.

After spending most of Thursday working while Maria ran some errands we were excited to go white water rafting through Royal Gorge on Friday. We had gone rafting this already summer in Switzerland so were interested to see how Colorado compared.

We were lucky to get a private raft with one of the more veteran guides. Our guide Johnathan had grown up in Canon City and educated us about the history of the gorge which included a lot of gold mining, railroad building, prison labor. The whole tour took about 2 hours to travel 8 miles through plenty of class 3 and 4 rapids while executing fancy moves like the “S” move high side shifts. About half way through we pulled off to the side and Johnathan showed us a good spot to go cliff jumping. We spent about 10 minutes swimming and jumping off rocks into the Arkansas River.

By the end of the day we had learned a lot about the gorge, the region, and rafting in general. We had also both developed lop sided sunburns as we were facing the same direction the whole way down. It didn’t take much discussion to agree taht the rapids were more intense than Switzerland and decided we needed a beer to celebrate. We hit up the McLellan’s, the local brewery, but were disappointed when their nut brown ale was neither brown nor an ale.

With the Canon City experience completed we were off to our next destination, Breckenridge.

“More photos of the stanley crew”

From Colorado sights, posted by Maria Scarpello on 8/23/2010 (26 items)