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My younger brother is much more adventurous than I am. Last summer he convinced me and a friend to check out a run that (to our knowledge) has never been done in a raft. There's usually good reason for that.

Anyway, it was terrifying. Really steep, continuous whitewater with little to zero room for error because a swim would have been brutal. The video doesn't do it justice, but I was shaking pretty bad.

Edit: It's always nice when I can rib on my younger brother. Here's a video of him flipping a raft that he's guiding. (Private trip btw)

1. Be outgoing, charismatic, a hardworker and fun to be around. AKA become extremely hire-able.
2. Get rid of things that cost you money. Rent, being one of them.
3. Avoid downtime. Season ended and the next one doesn't start for two months? That's bad.
4. Subscribe to /r/frugal

The Grand Canyon was beautiful, but I did it over Christmas, so it was freezing. Given the short days, and the depth of the canyon, on some days we never had direct sunlight.

The Illinois river in Oregon is also incredible. I enjoyed the Tuolumne river in CA too. My brother's outfit runs on the Upper Klamath. In terms of "fun" that stretch of whitewater is amazing. In college we also ran The Scott, which has some burly whitewater.

In general, for me, it's when you've known that you've totally blown a line and you're heading into something bad. Like a huge hole. Or about to slam up against a rock that could flip you. Yeah, in fact, knowing that you're probably about to flip a boat. We don't do it often, but it's kind of like a "man, I am not looking forward to this" kind of feeling. Like I said, for our rivers, it's a rare occurrence. In my career, boats that I've been guiding, I've flipped twice. There's a sang for this (flipping) too: "Those who have, those you will, and those that will again."

Oh man, tons of great stories, hard to come up with the best one. To rag on myself, when I was younger I helped pack a river trip that I wasn't going on myself. (I think school was starting, or something along those lines.) Anyway, this was a six day trip, and I forgot to include plates. This is kind of a problem because when you're on a trip you can't just run to the store or go back to the warehouse to pick up any forgotten items. You're in 2.3 million acres of wilderness. Anyway, they finally found another group and the guides on the trips traded a couple cases of beer for a dozen plates, which they then returned the following week. I think I still owe the guides beer for that mistake, now that I think about it.

A personal rule is I no longer pack for trips by myself that I'm not a part of. That same summer I did the same thing but with TP....That one got me in trouble.