After last weekend's Ward Campout, Seth and I were all prepared for another round of church camping! Thursday morning Seth and I woke up bright and early to go to Youth Conference. We met at the church at 6 am, and I think we were finally on the road somewhere around 7 am! We were headed up to Flaming Gorge. We were camping just outside of Dutch John, and I haven't been there in years, but I do remember it relatively green. Well...apparently that was before a forest fire whipped through the area a few years ago. We got to our campground and instead of having nice green trees it was a bunch of tree skeletons! It was sad to see the damage done by a forest fire. However, it's cool to see the land fighting back...there were some green weeds! We set up camp, and then spent the afternoon playing games. They had broken us up into two teams, the Lamanites and the Nephites. It was a lot of fun, our team wasn't so hot in the games, but what we lacked in talent we made up for in personality! That night we had an amazing feast, and then each team was supposed to come up with a skit based on a scripture story about missionaries. We told the story of Ammon to the tune of Sesame Street's theme song. And we threw in a rapping Ammon, courtesy of Spencer. It was a lot of fun...to give you an idea, instead of singing, "can you tell me how to get, how to get to Sesame Street", it went something like this: "Can you tell us how to join, so we don't get our arms cut off?" (Sung by the sheep slayers). It was awesome.
Friday morning, we were shuttled to the based of the dam (Seth insisted I lay off the "dam" jokes around the kids!) We had 4 rafts, and about 25-30 people. We all piled on and started off on our 7 mile trek down the Green River. The guy who rented us the rafts gave a big long speech about the dangers and risks involved in navigating this river, he made it sound like we were attempting the white water near Moab or something! Not to mention, after his speech we were pretty sure at least one or two kids would end up dead by the end of the trip! He was a little intense. Anyway, we start down the river, which was accurately compared to the Lazy River at Seven Peaks! We had a pretty fierce group in our raft, and I was the gunman. It didn't take long for the waterfights to start, and I was responsible for defending our ship. I don't know why they made me the gunner, I have horrible aim. Maybe it was all the pirate jokes I told the night before, they thought I'd make a good renegade! I don't know. But it didn't take long for me to realize that by holding the water gun, I was everyone else's target. Yikes! Anyway, before too long we were all soaked and having a great time. We were able to make it through all of the rapids with everyone in the boat, sometimes we went backwards through them, other times sideways, and occasionally we hit them head on. We seemed to run into more trouble getting stuck on the rocks under the water.
It had been overcast the entire morning, and somewhere around 4 miles we started hearing thunder...about a half-mile later...maybe a mile, it started to sprinkle, within two minutes the sprinkling turned into torrential downpour (I don't exaggerate!) We were getting soaked, and the rain was coming down in sheets. It was actually quite pretty. Thankfully the wind was to our backs, and we pushed ahead to make it to the end of the river. When we finally saw the ramp in the distance it was all speed ahead! I am pretty sure the raindrops themselves were the size of baseballs...okay, maybe golfballs! We were the first raft in, and helped everyone else get to shore as well. Unfortunately, Seth and I could not stay and play with our dripping comrades, we had to be back in SLC that evening. We ran to the car, and popped into the restroom to change our clothes, and as I ran into the bathroom I realized that's where our entire ward was hiding! It was funny. I can't even begin to describe how wet we were. We hope everyone had a great time the rest of the day (they weren't coming home until Saturday) and that they eventually dried out! I think somewhere around Evanston (about 2.5 hours into the drive) I stopped dripping! It was so much fun, and great to be around the youth in our ward.
Flaming Gorge Goodness pics
Friday morning, we were shuttled to the based of the dam (Seth insisted I lay off the "dam" jokes around the kids!) We had 4 rafts, and about 25-30 people. We all piled on and started off on our 7 mile trek down the Green River. The guy who rented us the rafts gave a big long speech about the dangers and risks involved in navigating this river, he made it sound like we were attempting the white water near Moab or something! Not to mention, after his speech we were pretty sure at least one or two kids would end up dead by the end of the trip! He was a little intense. Anyway, we start down the river, which was accurately compared to the Lazy River at Seven Peaks! We had a pretty fierce group in our raft, and I was the gunman. It didn't take long for the waterfights to start, and I was responsible for defending our ship. I don't know why they made me the gunner, I have horrible aim. Maybe it was all the pirate jokes I told the night before, they thought I'd make a good renegade! I don't know. But it didn't take long for me to realize that by holding the water gun, I was everyone else's target. Yikes! Anyway, before too long we were all soaked and having a great time. We were able to make it through all of the rapids with everyone in the boat, sometimes we went backwards through them, other times sideways, and occasionally we hit them head on. We seemed to run into more trouble getting stuck on the rocks under the water.
It had been overcast the entire morning, and somewhere around 4 miles we started hearing thunder...about a half-mile later...maybe a mile, it started to sprinkle, within two minutes the sprinkling turned into torrential downpour (I don't exaggerate!) We were getting soaked, and the rain was coming down in sheets. It was actually quite pretty. Thankfully the wind was to our backs, and we pushed ahead to make it to the end of the river. When we finally saw the ramp in the distance it was all speed ahead! I am pretty sure the raindrops themselves were the size of baseballs...okay, maybe golfballs! We were the first raft in, and helped everyone else get to shore as well. Unfortunately, Seth and I could not stay and play with our dripping comrades, we had to be back in SLC that evening. We ran to the car, and popped into the restroom to change our clothes, and as I ran into the bathroom I realized that's where our entire ward was hiding! It was funny. I can't even begin to describe how wet we were. We hope everyone had a great time the rest of the day (they weren't coming home until Saturday) and that they eventually dried out! I think somewhere around Evanston (about 2.5 hours into the drive) I stopped dripping! It was so much fun, and great to be around the youth in our ward.
Flaming Gorge Goodness pics
1 comment:
It looks like you have LOTS of fun running the racing rapids and building temples.
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