Bachelor parties and flat tires...

To close the trifecta of why kayaking is fun, let us not forget about river trips. Waking up next to the river, floating for a few miles, seeing new places, and making camp again all amongst good friends might be on of the best parts of our sport. In that vein, I thought I would close with this trip on the Chilko-Chilcoton in BC near Lake Louise.

The back story to this adventure, was a good friend was about to walk the plank into eternal matrimony and requested one last hoorah before his weekends were to fill up with to-do lists and trips to Bed Bath and Beyond.The answer of course, bachelor kayak roadtrip! (PS most my kayak roadtrips don't usually include to many women accompanying but bachelor kayak roadtrips are special because women can't come and what happens on the adventure stays on the adventure). Given high snow packs, a cool summer, flows were a bit on the highside when the said adventure was to occur but never fear there are usually lots of options north of the border with the only issues generally being lack of concrete beta and shuttle difficulties.

So one fine weekend a group of 10 or so men, one large armored truck, one full size van, one dirtbike, a few chainsaws, hydraulic winch, row frame raft, and copious amounts of beer headed north for 4 days and many miles of kayaking bliss. The Chilko-Chilcotin certainly the hardest things out there but what they lack in pure difficultly they gain in countless miles of class IV haystacks and read-run whitewater in the midst of some pretty remote wilderness. For a bonus side fact they are also extremely close to the put-in for the Homathako and actually drain the other side of its headwaters.   

Here's some pics enjoy;

I'm not sure why 90% of my kayak adventures involve driving through the night on dirt roads to get to a destination and arriving at or near sunrise but they do and I've made my peace with it. 

A lot of kayak adventures also involve a large automobile stuffed to the hilt with people and gear.

Hale-bop have fun on the white mile section

Faceshot anyone?

Thankfully rivertrips involve camp chilling. 10 guys, a keg of beer, and a lot of time on our hands. Oh just what are we going to do

Well for starters a little bit of this.

Not quite boofs for breakfast but the crew is falling in line and feeling that keg of beer right about now.

No kayak adventure is complete without a stop to one of these...luckily some locals just let the air out of a tire and we didn't have to deal anything more serious.

   Until next time, SYOTR.