Grand Canyon, Middle Fork, Sauk River, and Targhee photos

Good Summer; Eric Richins

Hello.

Good to reach all of you wonderful people. I hope you are all doing well and happy where you are. I have had an amazing few years, and this last one was especially great. I have been traveling more than ever, staying busy with school, rafting more than imaginable, snowboarding, making tons of great new friends from Washington, Oregon, Idaho, California, Mexico, Chile, and Argentina. I have been working on four different rivers and have been on six or seven since the beginning of the summer. I started the season with a 16 day geology float on the Colorado River via Grand Canyon with an Evergreen professor and 15 students. We learned geologic history, anthropologic history, current events, and environmental issues concerning the Colorado River System. The day after I returned from this float my class and I were on Mount Rainier studying glacial geomorphology and river dynamics. We also made several field trips to the Skokomish River, a massive landslide, wash away beach where it has eroded 2.5 miles in the last 50 years, and many other great places throughout Washington.

After school ended in mid June I hurried to the Wenatchee River in Leavenworth Washington where I have worked for the last three summers. We spent most of the summer crashing into the monster waves of central Washington on daily and sometimes twice daily floats. This is also an amazing town for rock climbing, backpacking, and music. I had tons of fun and only one flip!

High water on the Wenatchee soon ran out so I headed back to the mother land of Central Idaho for an amazing week-long float with the my parents Bill and Ginger, cuz Marg, old friends, and some river friends Joe, Johnny, and Hannah on the Middle Fork Salmon River. We encountered one of the craziest rain-wind storms in all history and were surprised to find flood debris that created several new rapids in the storm-induced chocolate waters. I was the first paddle raft guide to descend ‘Tappan Three’ or what I call ‘The Brown Slide,’ a gnarly, wood laden, class IV-V monster rapid at that time being only 12 hours old. The best part of the trip was of course the company, hot springs, and big waves.

I then returned to Washington for some low-water Wenatchee floats and then made it again back to Idaho and the Middle Fork for a week-long commercial float with some old friends who work there. I then volunteered at the annual Idaho Rivers United Salmon Festival where we listened to tons of music, taught people about salmon biology and current salmon issues, and gave salmon spawning tours on the Salmon River just downstream from Redfish Lake. We were observing salmon who had swam over 950 miles from the Pacific through the Columbia, Snake, and Salmon Rivers. I then found my self llama packing with the folks in Yellowstone and sitting in a hot spring under a 200 foot waterfall.

I spent my 22^nd birthday, September first, in Missoula Montana with some old friends from high school and first grade. We had a great breakfast on the town and met up with 20 of my friend’s friends who were celebrating another September 1rst birthday. Four of us drove into Idaho for a full eight hours of hotspringing and then I drove onto Washington for some more boating on the Sauk River.

I just bought my own 15 and a half foot raft and will be using it this winter and fall. I took it on its maiden voyage on the Tieton River on the 20^th of September and had only one swimmer! The Tieton has been tons of fun. It is a really fast moving flood-stage river that is released from Rimrock Lake via dam every September. I flipped my boat for the second time a week ago and we took an exhilarating rock garden-swim.

I am now shifting gears into school mode. I am a junior at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington and started Monday. I have been studying riparian ecology which is a fancy word for rivers. I am currently in a masters salmon biology class as well as beginning Spanish. I am also working on a project to take students down the Skagit River to study salmon behavior and biology. Hope to see y’all soon.

Peace and Goodness,

Eric

ericrichins@hotmail.com