So much to tell...
OK, so Wednesday night for dinner we had spaghetti, and then after an evening devotional from a couple of the seniors in our group (Loren Franz, Christian Bateman), headed off to bed.
Day Two had some big surprises in store for me. We had a pancake-and-sausage breakfast, then we hiked up the road towards town to reach Rainbow Falls:
The top picture shows the top of the falls, while the bottom one shows the base of the falls, which is where we were (the trail to a viewpoint higher up was closed, darn it!). I took off my shoes and managed to cross to the other side through the water. Then Ben Betteridge and Christian Bateman, as part of a dare, stripped down to just their underwear and got their entire bodies in the water. I kinda wanted to do it too, so I stripped down to only my undies, and slowly but surely got my whole body into the water! I only stayed in for a minute or two, because it was cold, but it was one of my big accomplishments of the trip, doing something I thought I wouldn't do at all.
Next on our agenda was whitewater rafting down the Stehekin River. When the guide ran off his safety spiel, I actually got a little bit tense when he mentioned that if we fell out of the raft we would have to stay in whitewater swim position (legs pointing straight out in front of you), something I wasn't sure I would be able to do, or we might end up breaking something due to the current. Sounds silly now, but I was pretty nervous at the time.
Turns out it was just a waste of energy, as it was a fun ride through and through. A couple of times we hit rapids that send up plunging through a whole boatload of water, totally soaking us, but I just laughed it off instead of getting freaked about it. Nobody fell off once! (we were split up among two rafts, one of which held a small family along with some of the guys).
The guide on our raft, Rory, a big "pumbaa-looking" guy, told us to paddle "forward two", or "all forward hard", or "forward left only", and pointed out some cool stuff, like some houses that got washed out in the flood that happened back in '03. He told us we would be going off an 18-foot jump, but I didn't understand initially that we would be STOPPING at a big rock we'd be jumping off of, and I instead jumped to the conclusion that we were going off the jump IN THE RAFT! No, I wasn't super scared about that or anything, just a little thrown; I figured if they'd been doing this for such a long time, that last bit was probably safe enough.
So after reaching the jump location, basically a big ol' rock we had to hike up a trail to get to. I was too nervous to try it, yet everyone else was jumping off and not getting hurt in any way (including a kid about half my height, who just loved it), so after some back-and-forth I finally built up the courage to try it. I got my running start and kicked off, screaming "BANZAI!!!!!".
I've never fallen from this high before, so it was new to me to feel wind rushing up past me as I fell for just a couple seconds. I hit the water pretty hard, but it didn't hurt much (maybe the shirt I was wearing, along with the life jacket and water boots helped with that), and it wasn't too cold either. I ended up trying it again, and probably would've done it a third time had we not had to move on to our last stop. This was my second accomplishment on the trip.
(continued in Part III)
Awesome!!
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