Gauley Marathon ft. Kendra

And now-- a guest post from Kendra!!!    

    Over the summer, the Young Women went white water rafting in West Virginia. While there, our guide mentioned that in the fall they have Gauley season which involves more intense white water rafting and I desperately wanted to go. I started pestering my parents about it and looking at possible dates and things. The Gauley is split into two sections, the Upper and the Lower. The Upper is super intense with five highly technical class 5+ rapids. The Lower on the other hand is comparable to white water rafting we have done in the past. I originally argued for the Lower Gauley since I'm pretty sure Mom would not support me and Dad doing the Upper. Then, when dad was looking at prices he was offered a discount where you could do the entire Gauley for less than it would cost to do half the Gauley. With that offer we decided to commit to 26 miles of white water rafting aka the Gauley Marathon. 

We made our down payment in August and one month later we headed out to the wild and wonderful state!

    We drove down Sunday evening and spent the night camping in a Boy Scout camp. This was very bare bones camping. We showed up, set up, ate dinner, slept, and left. We didn't even make a fire. 

Dinner was really good though!

     Instead of making a fire we opted to star gaze and yap, which was also really fun. We went to bed and woke up the next morning at the wonderful hour of 5 am. The one upside to this insanity was that the stars were out in abundance. 

You can see Orion over our tent! And this was taken on my phone! And Orion is our favorite constellation so we were feeling pretty hyped 

    We needed to be at ACE at 6 am so we broke down camp as fast as possible and ate muffins in the car on the way there. We got to ACE and signed in and listened to a brief safety lecture before being dismissed for ~1 hour to take care of any final business.

Wet suited up!

After that we got on a bus and headed to the start of the Gauley! 

Dad and I are in front with the yellow helmets

     The rafting itself was really fun but definitely scary at times. I fell out of the boat. Twice. Luckily our guides were very well prepared for emergencies and everyone was ok but it was definitely alarming. The first time our boat hit a rock at the wrong angle and completely tipped over. This was double fun because the boat right after us also tipped over so we ended up having 11 people in one boat that is really meant for a maximum of 7. I was kneeling in the boat and the water was up to my waist. Both the guides quickly flipped over their boats and we all dispersed back to our original boats. 

You had to high five Pillow Rock with your paddle

There was actually a reason for this-- the goal was to weight the raft on one side so we wouldn't tip over as we hit that rock, which we totally succeeded in doing!

Unfortunately, right after that we were supposed to go to the left of Volkswagon Rock, but somehow we went right over it, which was NOT the plan...

There's us on top of Volkswagon Rock 

And there's me shoving dad into the rapid as we flip over... Oops?

Everyone in the water!

The second time I fell out was on a rapid called "Box of Fluffy Kittens" and it was very deliberate of our guide. Like, this rapid is known for tipping people out and could have easily been avoided. This time was fun because I ended up going under the boat, which I wasn't prepared for but I'm pretty good at holding my breath and it was really only a second where I realized that there was something on top of me and then I was out.  

See Dad fell out on his own too!

     We stopped for lunch around 11ish after going down a (tiny) waterfall. This was fun because we got to watch other boats go down the waterfall and not all of them made it through without tipping. After lunch it was incredibly chill, just a lot of itty bitty rapids and paddling. After we finished our adventure we hopped on the bus to head back to ACE and got there around 5pm. We were told that they would be showing the video of our trip at 6 so we decided that if we hadn't left we would go watch. And then they didn't show it and we decided to head on out since we were driving home that night. The drive home was uneventful, we called different family members to tell them that we were alive and had a ton of fun. 

So yeah it was a super fun trip and I'm really glad I dragged my dad into going with me!

P.S. from Alanna-- I could not BELIEVE it when Craig agreed to do this!!!  I spent the whole time praying that they would survive.  I was honestly very nervous about it all.  But now that it's done, I'm very glad that they had so much fun.