You Will Just Have to See it for Yourself

Despite Ari threatening to put a damper on our Mendon to Cutler canoe trip, we went anyway. Ari was not invited; instead he spent the afternoon with CoCo (aka the neighbors). I didn't realize it until we left that this was the first time Joe and I have been on an outing (aside from a short errand or two) without Ari. Pretty crazy. Gotta love great neighbors.

Because we were so engrossed in the rapture of not having to pack 1/2 the house for Ari we failed to do any sort of double checking...this resulted in no memory card for the camera. I know I know, I've disappointed you all greatly. Instead I will have to attempt to tell you what you WOULD have seen had the camera actually been storing photos.

First of all, if you like classic cars and yard sales you will LOVE this section of river. Picture with me if you will floating past entire river banks of cars; and sometimes even floating right over the top of them! It definitely gives the river a sunken ship, buried treasure sort of feel. You also got to float past other peoples junk; chairs, dis guarded plastic furniture, bottles, cement slabs, etc. You would have seen photos of me and K-So in the canoe, K-So and I swimming together in a (seemingly clean) swimming hole. You wildlife enthusiasts would have oohed and awed over the photos of deer (2 bucks with velvet), beaver, herons, egrets, great horned owls, king birds, geese, ducks, king fishers and on and on. Photos of us crashing through bushes only to emerge covered in spiders and their webs, fish swimming beneath the canoe in the clear cool water...then the water turning stagnant and mucky the closer you got to cutler, a metal pipe dumping water looking like urine into the river. I would have intersected the aforementioned gallery with a story of how we were gone much longer than we had intended so you would have gotten a photo of Joe tromping off into the bush to find the road (and get the car) as I continued on...then Joe calling me back because he hit a swamp, me paddling back upstream to get him; us finally finding a take out and hauling the canoe up a steep bank.

My favorite photos would have come at the end. Joe's first hitchhiking experience! Can you believe I don' t have that on film? He was such a natural...with a little coaching from me of course. He got a ride to the gas station off the main road where we had stashed a bike, then he used the bike to navigate through the side roads to get our car. The other greatest photo would have been of me pushing/pulling the canoe through an abandoned alfalfa field until I hit the highway. It must have been quite the site for highway travelers; some five foot two inch scrawny girl wrangling a canoe the size of nam to the highway.

All in all I don't recommend this section, unless of course your into birds or your favorite river is the Jordan River in SLC. I would be more inclined to float from Main Street in Logan to Mendon...in a Kayak.

It would have been a great post.