We had a 54 km paddle today to the mouth of the Spokane River at Twin Rivers where we had a decent campground but NO casino.
What kind of organization closes their Casino/Restaurant etc on a day of 87 º F ( 31ºC) with 150-200 Paddlers coming into the main campground area.? Twin Rivers Casino does.!
The headwind was pretty strong most of the day and we were all feeling it at the end of the day.
Besides only having about half of the facilitys available we all made do. 3 of the showers were broken but the toilets worked and that sometimes makes all the difference.I went down to the Spokane River and washed in the river. A fellow paddler came down ,she walked into the river screamed " It is very Invigorating " at the top of her voice and went back up the hill.I never had a chance to tell her it was only COLD for a few minutes until you got used to it. :-)
June 21 - The Solstice
Split the teams into two as we only had enough paddlers to make it a split. The first team (6 paddlers )did 18 km and then we met them at a very nice campground Take Out. We (6 others) then had a fantastic paddle for 22 km to Kellers Ferry. The National Park is absolutely beautiful, as is the entire Columbia Basin on both sides. We have seen small amounts of deer and actually saw a couple of Rattlesnakes in this camp. I never did see one but did hear about two encounters. On the previous day we saw a garter snake swimming in the river.Tried using Collect on a landline and my credit card was not allowed as I didn`t have a 5 digit Zip code.
June 22
Very Hot at 89 º F. I paddled 22 Km to the Grand Coulee Dam and we had another fantastic National Park Campground.We were there very early and basically had a very easy day. Several people went to town for the Dam tour several of us went geocaching and tried to teach a newbie about it.I do not believe we created a convert.We had fun anyway. Grand Coulee is a very nice town indeed.Snake was spotted here as well.
June 23
The proposed days trip was supposed to be hard paddling with a strong headwind and 73 ºF.We had to move the boats about 20 kms upriver to put in so we were up at 4:30 AM (the sun was up already) and we had all the boats in the water by 7:30.Taking down the tent and packing everything every day into a truck you can actually get fairly good at it.The people who run the grand coulee dam had a large amount of water coming out of Lake Roosevelt when we went by it, so we had a good current for the first +_ 20 KMs.With a good current and a tailwind we were scooting along very well. We got to the crew change and the other team never showed up so I got a 39 km paddle. The problem is that we have 2 canoes and only 14 people in camp. We have to move 3 vehicles so we need extra people. As there are 9 teams there are a lot of paddlers and sometimes we cannot get that extra person to help us move a vehicle.Hence we only get one canoe into the water.You have to have 6 people minimum in a boat as anything less is just too hard.We are averaging 50 - 60 strokes a minute so when it gets hot we need to stop about every hour for a small break.
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