June Full Moon on the Kings

Well it was the June full moon on Monday so Matt and I headed out to the Kings River for some moonlight rafting. We had an interesting group of some of my family, some of Matt’s family, and a few of Matt’s friends. We brought our large raft, two inflatable kayaks, our rafting gear, our camping gear, food and beer for five days, and this was the result.

And of course there’s Riken! Ready for her first camping trip!

We were extremely lucky to snag a camp spot that we did. It’s right next to the river feature called “Forever Eddy,” because the river runs into the bank on the left and causes the water to swirl around. It basically turns into a lazy river, a perfect place to hang out throughout the day. Usually someone’s already someone camped out there, so we were glad to camp there.

We also brought Riken’s kennel. We didn’t want her in the tent since we knew there was no way to keep her clean out there. I didn’t trust her out by herself, for all I know she’d run after squirrels or other night time animals. So it worked really well having the kennel, we covered it too to give her a tent like experience as well.

Ah floating around in Forever Eddy. It’s so peaceful yet fun at the same time. Especially with a beer in hand.

Here’s Riken’s canine floatation device from NRS. She really loves playing in water. Just gets up and runs to the side of the river, jumps all around, digs in it, sticks her nose in, even lies down. But she does not like to swim. I gave her a chance to practice swimming and she would swim back to the beach and then run away from me. Which is probably a good thing while we’re rafting, we know she won’t want to jump out of the raft.

Taking her on her first rafting trip, she started pretty confident. She enjoyed spending time with us and seeing things float by. She easily jumped over the thwarts to be with me or Matt. Things were looking good.

However, once we got into the bigger rapids, she was less excited about rafting. She got drenched, thrown around a bit, and I saw her shivering. We want her to get more used to it, so we’ll keep taking her with us. We’ll do short trips, not full ones, and try to avoid the bigger rapids with her.

But overall she made it! We were so proud of her. But she couldn’t wait to get back on land!

It was a fun rafting trip. But the whole reason we came out was for the moonlight rafting. During the full moon, the whole canyon is lit up, even the river. You can see everything. Too bad my camera can’t see anything. So no pictures from that trip. The first part of our trip was 12 drunken raft guides sloshing around in a boat made for 6. Then we met up with Matt’s friends and my dad and brother for the second half of the river. On the river most everyone was fine, but once the rafting was over, everyone was freezing. Guess I should have drank some more on the raft.

The next day we didn’t take Riken out with us, we didn’t want to push her. So she stayed with my dad, and got a little lonely.

But she got filthy while she was out on the river. She’d run into her pool, roll over, then run up the the camp and roll in the dirt. We ended up taking her to the groomer on our way back home so we wouldn’t arrive at home and have to unpack with a dirty dog. It worked out well, we had lunch while she got all cleaned up.

It was a fun trip with good people, but then again, it’s always a good time on the river.