here we are at the boat launch. we had lunch first at the restraunt/cafe/bar that's attached to the docks and then were ready to begin our adventure! the three of us that did the trip are pictured below : your's truly, joe and eli.
the night before eli had checked the weather and it had said that it'd be partly cloudy so we weren't too worried. once we got on the water and paddled for mabye 30 minutes these dark clouds started assembling. oops! we weren't too worried because we're all pretty aware and prepared to deal with things if a huge storm brews up but we decided that we were going to try to keep ahead of it the whole way. this picture is of joe and eli at the front of the storm. 
and another picture showing the amazing clouds! during the whole trip we stayed just ahead of the storm hearing thunder in the background and getting only a few sprinkles on us. it was very pleasant and cool and the lighting made my pictures look all that much better. 
because i was behind my camera the whole time i handed off my camera to eli to take a picture of me just to prove that i was, in fact, there. 
there were some amazing cliff walls right along parts of the river and eli decided that he was going to try and climb some of those. this picture is after he had jumped in the water from the rocks and was getting up on his kayak. yeah, you can tell he grew up on the califonia coast...
this was an incredible rock that i thought looked just like a skull. i can totally see treasure island and goonies taking place here.
while on our trip down the river we found lots of trash from those (grrrrr!) messy partiers on the river. eli would go picking up the trash he could and once in a while he and joe would find a treasure (i did mention treasure island, right?!). here is a blowup lobster that he found, affectionately named "lobby the lobster".
and here's joe with one of his found treasures - a buoy! he also was on the sit-on-top kayak and so got to carry the ice chest with him. when it got really windy he definitely had to paddle a bit more than me and eli to prevent from drifting upstream.
we timed our trip so that we got close to the end just as the sun was setting. we sat and watched the sun go down until it started getting really dark and then we paddled as hard as we could to get to the pull out. we had forgotten to bring our headlamps so i wanted to make sure that i could kind of find my way to the car. while i was paddling in the dark through a whole bunch of sedges there were a ton of coots in front of my kayak. when i would get close to them you could see the whole flock run on the water ahead of me. it was so neat because i could only see the water as it sprayed from their feet but the actual duck was lost in the darkness. i wish that i could've captured that on film for you because it was so awesome!! 
it was wonderful to do this little trip and i really wish that we had done it earlier in the season. when i come back down to arizona i'll definitely have to do this again!
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