Bend - Day 7 - Rafting the Rogue

This was the best day ever and it happened Marisa's Birthday. After having a peaceful morning drinking coffee and watching the sunrise on Diamond Lake, we followed Dean to a town called Merlin which was off the 5. We stopped at the Rogue Rafting Center, where he arranged for someone to drop off our car at the take out point. I left my car there and we all got into Dean's car to drive to the put in at Hogs Creek. We pumped up the raft and took off for a 6 hour river tour.


This is Dean our sexy and fearless guide. He definitely knew what he was doing so we felt very safe.


We stopped at a rope swing.


That's me diving head first.


This is where we stopped for lunch.



Marisa paddles.


Trista relaxes.



We planned on taking out at Grave's Creek, which was a 10 mile stretch of the river from where we put in. However, what we didn't know was that there would be stretches of the river that weren't moving. To make things more difficult the wind was blowing up river so if we didn't paddle, we'd actually get pushed back up river. So there were a few really difficult times where we had to paddle our hearts out to get to the current. It was already getting dark and Dean kept asking people on the river how far Grave's was. Everyone said it was a good distance longer. We decided to get out at an earlier spot and hitchhike to get Dean's car at Grave's Creek.

We didn't have a campground yet and our goal was to find something that was out in the open so we could sleep under the starts and see the meteor shower. We had met some nice locals on the river who were camping at Alameda and they said it was a good spot for that. So it was actually pretty convenient that we got off the river at the campsite. Marisa and I checked out the open sites, there were plenty, and found a perfect end site with no trees and a view of the river.



We cooked Marisa's Birthday dinner. It was veggie stir fry with brown rice and whole grain bread.


We slept out on the beach under the stars and watched the shower. It wasn't as intense as I've seen before, but we did do a lot of oooing and awing.

Here's me in the morning after a late night of meteor shower viewing. We slept on a patch of beach. I took an early morning skinny dip in the river behind me to freshen up for out next destination, Lassen Volcanic National Park.