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 22nd 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 20th 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
3 comments:
Hey Eric!! So glad that you joined in the blog!!!
Man, those are some incredible adventures! So cool! I bet it was so beautiful and amazing. Last year, my big excursion was to hike/rappel in a place called Mystery Canyon in Zion National park. It was so great and as of now, the scariest thing I've ever done!! But really cool and I'm so glad that I was able to do it.
Thanks for posting, Eric! Hey, you mentioned being in Argentina. Where were you? You remember that I was a missionary there(in the north west) for a year and a half so I love Argentina. When my parents came to pick me up, we went to Iguazu Falls. Did your trip have to do with the falls?
Thanks again!
Kathy,
Great to hear from you. I have not yet been to Argentina or south America at all. I do remember hearing about your time there. I did make a lot of friends this winter from Argentina and Chile. They were working with me at Grand Targhee Ski resort in the Tetons. I taught them how to snowboard and they are going to teach me to surf when I do go down there. I keep in touch with a few of them several times a week. I think my friend Manuel and Jorge are coming back this winter to snowboard and they want me to go back with them after that. I think I am going soon. For now i am in school and having a great time. Last night I got into this really cool creative writing class and I am also in Spanish and salmon biology.
Mystery Canyon sounds great. A couple years ago my friend Doug and I rappelled into the Subway, also in Zion. I really love it there.
I hope I can take you rafting sometime. It's my new favorite thing to do, at least for the summertime.
Thanks for putting this thing together.
What fun! My big adventure this last year was... I dunno. Not big on adventures lately. I have been rafting a tiny bit in college and loved it- hopefully when the kids get bigger/able to swim we can do more of it (but not so many awesome rivers here in Maryland)
Eric, I'm glad you posted! I remember meeting you once when there was that Yellowstone reunion (before Nick and I were even married) and we all went shooting. You had a pet milk carton you were carrying around and your dad asked if he could hold it for a minute and then shot the heck out of it. How is that for a memory? Actually, that trip might be the only time I've met your dad too, so glad to get to know everyone on the blog.
Wait.. maybe there was one trip to Oregon coast, also. But what I'm trying to say is it was too long ago!
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