On June 12, Troop 1 Katonah went on a exciting white water rafting trip in Pennsylvania. We departed form KES at 7:00am, and we arrived in Jim Thorpe, PA around 9:30am. Once there, we made our way to the check-in center, where we rented our wet suits for the day ahead of us. Everything was quite organized, even with so many people in one area.
We waited about an hour and a half before lining up to receive our life jackets, and boarding passes (luckily which nobody lost!). All of the buses were then loaded up, and we took a twenty minute ride to our launch site for the Lehigh River. The guides for the trip assembled all of us in our rafts in the area and went over every detail, and safety regulations of the trip before we entered the water. The contents of the raft included a water-bailing bucket, and a water tight bucket for our lunches.
When we entered the water, we soon realized why these people were called the "White Water Challengers." We met many rapid parts of the river, and we had the maneuvers explained to us before we went through them. During the parts of the river where we weren't battling waves and rocks, everyone was getting drenched in the on-going bail-bucket splash war between all of the rafts. We stopped for lunch at about 1:00, on a big rock where all of the rafts were parked.
When our journey down the river continued, we finally encountered the most intense rapids of the day, where everyone fought to keep their raft from hitting big rocks, or getting stuck. We had to go through these rapids in an orderly fashion to prevent back-ups or collisions. When we finally conquered the part of the river that we set out to do that day, we took turns getting our rafts and gear out of the river, and on to the trucks.
We spent four and a half hours on the river and covered a lot of distance. The bus ride this time took only about ten minutes to get back to the check-in area. Before we left, we all took a quick look in the gift shop, and got a little food for the ride home. We were all exhausted, but we're looking forward to a return trip next year!
—Kyle W., Troop Historian