River Reading Strategies for Whitewater Rafting

Video Transcript

"After planning your trip and reading the guidebooks you have a pretty good understanding of what to expect on the river, understanding also that the river changes continually and the guidebooks aren’t necessarily updated. So things changes from day to day, week to week, month to month, to month so you always need to make sure as you’re working your way downstream, you lift your vision and you anticipate and figure out what’s going on before it surprises you. One of the ways to do this is to river read on the fly. You can scout downstream, figure out your route and sort of plan how to get there. Also if there’s an area where it’s hard for you to see downstream you can pull to one side of the river or the other, stop in an eddy and scout from the eddy. You can eddy hop your way downstream, it’s a very conservative way to work your way downstream and to scout from the river. That way you’ll never too surprised as you work your way down. Um, you can come down a section of river that you are super comfortable with, real familiar with and there can be a tree down in the middle of the river and uh, that’s something that wasn’t there the day before. You need to be able to see that before it’s upon you, so again raising your vision, understanding that the river changes continually is a great way for you to approach your descent downstream. "