Happy to announce that by midnight tonight most of my new website will be up and running. I especially want to draw your attention to the “guided canoe trip” section. These are going to be some terrific trips. I hope people don’t think they are too expensive. Actually they are running about 50% below market, but I know many of the people that follow my adventures are not accustomed to guided trips and these fees may seem a trifle dear. Let me tell you, by the time I go through all the hoops and pay all the fees, unsnarl all the red tape, pay liability insurance and marketing costs; these trips will be a real bargain and will likely be non-profit! But the good news? I get to go to some really cool places with some really great people. So join up. These are real adventures.
One trip is in danger of not filling and that is a travesty. At one point I had 8 people signed up with me to go down the lower canyons of the Rio Grande. This will be an amazing expedition with truly awesome canyons, gem-like hotsprings, hidden back in the cane …plus a backdrop of blue cloudless skies — warm days in early February!
I think I know what is happening. All 8 of my paddlers were guys and I think their wives and daughters have been watching too much CBS News. They see people on the Mexican border getting riddled with bullets and decapitated bodies floating in the Rio Grande. Hey, this is way downstream of where we will be paddling. We are up in the desolate tall canyons. Just friendlies where we are and not too many of them. Fewer people, in fact, than ever in human history. The Comanche are just about gone, the drug runners are downstream, the wacko vigilante minutemen are running scared. All that’s there now are just a few cowboys on horseback, the odd little adobe homestead and maybe a few migrant workers sneaking across. It’s empty, lawless and awesome. It will be like 1912 not 2012 and if you watched the movie True Grit and wished you could have exchanged places with those characters, here is your chance.
So I am still looking for some adventurers with grit. The water is record low, meaning no rafts, just canoes and darn few of them. And you can be paddling one of them. Dave Smith and I once looked into starting an ambulance service. Our motto was going to be, “DOA, you don’t pay”. I am making a similar offer for those with grit that choose to paddle the Rio Grande with me. Complete refund for anyone that comes home in a box. I was down there last winter, it’s safer than Apple Valley, let’s go.