Dallas' Sierra adventure

As Alistair and I drove east through Friday afternoon rush hour traffic, many thoughts were bouncing around in my head. Parting advice had ranged from the practical (‘If you get a hot spot on your foot, for crying out loud, look after it immediately!’, and ‘Be careful on the river crossings’) to the more general yet still heartfelt (‘ Don't f*** yourself up’). Now, for better or for worse, the kids were dispatched to family friends and we were off.

Things did not perhaps get off to an ideal start. We drove into a spectacularly quiet campground and pulled up to our spot located next to the only noisy group – several families crushed into two adjoining campsites. They were in high spirits and replied to the ranger's question on numbers ‘Oh, we have 11 adults and some children but they are only small’. Presumably the children were also fast and therefore unable to be counted (although we were pretty sure there was more than one) as the ranger agreed that they were within the allotted count of six people per site! Nice strategy. The happy party continued on. I was therefore delighted to return their consideration with an extra loud clanging of the bear box door and lustily shouted car-backing instructions to Alistair at 5:30 a.m. the next morning as we left for the first part of the long weekend's adventures.

Which was… white-water rafting on the upper Tuolumne River, also known as Cherry Creek (the predawn start was predicated on the release of the ‘bubble’ of water from the dam above). This is the only commercially guided Class V white-water in the United States. Class V, essentially the highest grade in rafting if you don't want to die, had always sounded ridiculously insane and scary until Al and I navigated one rapid of this difficulty on the lower Tuolumne river last year. It was as if a light had exploded in my head and all I could think was ‘THAT is what I want to do!!’.

Now, however, I was suffering rather cold feet (proverbially; the physical equivalent was yet to come) as I had Googled the run the previous week and had been dismayed to discover that second suggested search term was ‘Cherry Creek death’. As my dad would say ‘and in her heart her knees were knocking’. We met our guides and the other four clients on the trip, a group from Los Angeles which seemed to revolve around a common church and which included its pastor. This was somewhat reassuring as I figured that in endeavours such as this it never hurt to have God on your side (and possibly the Saints and Apostles backing up from behind).

Down by the river and amped up on double espressos, the guides ran us through our paces. There were agility exercises and assessments of fitness which included running up hill in our wetsuits on a single breath. Then it was into the raft for a series of practice manoeuvres and a warm-up run down some Class III water. The final tests before embarking on the real deal were a swim underneath the raft facing up to gain experience in escaping from beneath a flipped raft and a swim across a Class III rapid to the other side of the river and back. If the coffee hadn't worked, this certainly did! Plunging from the raft into the freezing maw of white froth certainly got hearts and adrenaline pumping. The tests gave us a good idea of what falling out of the boat lower down might be like and there was a well emphasised opportunity to back out now before it was too late. Everyone passed the test and no one backed out. It was go time.

The next three hours flew by in a blur. Adam, our guide, demanded that we respond quickly and strongly to his instructions, and would spend time at the top of each rapid going over the required manoeuvres and which way would be the best to swim if you were unfortunate enough to get thrown out. Luckily everyone stayed in the boat as I am not sure if we would have remembered the instructions in the midst of all the action. We would rush down in a mighty froth of white-water and paddle for all we were worth, with little time at the bottom to catch our breath before the next monster drop approached. Adam was clearly an extremely competent guide; it was not fear that I felt, but sheer exhilaration. This was the hard drugs equivalent in rafting - at the end both Alistair and I agreed that anything easier would not now evoke the same natural high. At the end of run lunch, everyone was in high spirits as cold beer flowed along with vows to return the following year.