Thanks Phil, Colleen, Ed, Tim, Mike, Ken and Drellas! It's good to see that some of my excitement about our annual ritual comes through in the sketches. Drellas' comment in particular was funny and very true. During our working years (two of us are now retired and one is partly retired) we so looked forward to these trips as complete escapes from the workaday world (and it's easy to feel you have escaped when you're in a canyon with no phones, no internet and no public through roads). That's why we made a pact after the first one that we would try to do them for 20 years (and this year is our 26th!) and with just the three of us - no family, no friends, just us.
So yes, Drellas, we all definitely wanted to feel (and I guess that translated to looking) like these trips were our lives. :-O
We put on the river this coming Sunday, so right now there is a pile of gear on the floor, all ready to go except for cleaning the cooler and loading the food and ice. Oh, yes, and then the slight matter of a 6-hour drive south to get to Ken's place, and then about a two hour process the following day of loading the boats, all the gear, and getting the truck key to the shuttle driver, and then - finally - wading into the bracing water (no waders this time of year, just shorts and bare legs) to get the rafts in position and loaded and we're off.
So here are two more anticipatory sketches from previous years' photos. The first at least marginally fits the forum theme, as it shows an Osprey nest in one of the platforms built for just that purpose. Many of the Osprey nests in the canyon (and there are dozens, perhaps hundreds) are built on railroad telegraph poles (now used for wires that constitute a landslide warning system for the trains to be aware of blockages on the tracks). But those poles are a bit low and have some hazards to the birds, so the ranchers and Indian tribe (whose huge reservation makes one side of the river off-limits for about half our float) put up these platforms to encourage the birds to nest there. Many of them are occupied shortly after being put up. The second sketch is one example of our sophisticated camp 'kitchen' area, with a tarp we hang using three oars lashed together as the main support for the rope holding up the tarp. We often don't put up any tents, just sleeping out under the stars on cots, but it's always wise to have a covered area to scramble to in the event of a thunderstorm.
These sketches are quite quickly done, so they definitely are pretty rough from an artistic viewpoint.