Our weekend trip started with the phone alarm going off at 4:30am. This time of year that means it’s dark outside, really dark. But dawn is just around the corner.
I’ve learned over the years that I need to have everything ready the night before or it will never work. Too much time would escape and then we would lose our valuable parking space at the take-out point of the river. We only live a couple of miles from Granite Reef Recreation Area so we are usually there by 5:15am.
I grabbed this image from the website of Redline rentals which is the place that rented us our first Kayak. Try them out if you are new to the area. They are very close to Granite reef where my wife and I first hit the river. A day or so later we had purchased our first kayak that we found on Facebook marketplace.
After we drop the pick up car, we head upriver with the Kayak on the roof to Water Users Recreation Area. Once there, we use the most eastern access ramp down to the river to launch. There are a couple of western launch sites but we prefer to launch from the lagoon and get the absolute maximum out of the river. Using Google Earth I measured the entire route and it’s 12 miles give or take a few feet from put-in to take-out.
The plan is to go again tomorrow only this time I am going to try something new, taking along a DSLR with a small telephoto so that I can branch out from the iPhone / Galaxy images. It may actually be that I could use the Galaxy instead of the DSLR, but I’m not really used to it yet. Since we don’t have that much time left in the season for riding the river, I want to try and get some good bird shots as well as some of the Bighorn Sheep that hang out on the north bank of the river.
Once we saw that there were Sheep here we back paddled and then crossed the river and beached the Kayak. I was trying to zoom with the iPhone and it was just too shaky, especially out on the water. In this image there are two visible Big Horn, one male, one female. Click on the image and then magnify, they are easy to spot.
