We stayed at a cute campground on our first night on the road, after driving for 6 or so hours we pretty much set up camp, ate some food (and realised the limitations of a basic kitchen set) and got some much needed sleep.
When we woke the next day the weather was lovely and we hit the road heading for Golden, BC for our first attempt at white water rafting!!! We chose Wild Water as the offered a great half day trip.
As our “Whitewater Exciter” wasn’t until the afternoon we had time to stop off at the Giant Cedars Boardwalk in Mount Revelstoke Park. It was a quick half an hour stop where we could walk round a circular route between giant cedars. It was pretty cool to see how giant these giant cedars were (obviously) and was a welcome rest for are tired legs.
We did have a slight incident where we weren’t quite sure what time zone we were in! There is a date line between where we camped and the white water centre so we did have a bit of trouble working out what the actual time was!!
After we worked that out we headed off for Golden to don some wet suits, helmets and head into the Kicking Horse river. Our guide was Andrew from England (!!) who was pretty experienced as rafting guides come with many years as a rafting guide, which eased both our minds as we were a little apprehensive having never rafted before!
After a safety briefing we took up position on the back of the raft and began our trip. The Kicking Horse River was beautiful, glacial run off caused the water to be an amazing blue colour and icy cold! The river was named in 1858 when a James Hector was exploring to find out possible routes for the Canadian Pacific Railway was kicked by his pack horse into the river whilst exploring it.
The rapids ranged from II to IV in difficulty but in all honesty were pretty manageable to most people. The experience was a real adrenaline rush crashing through the waves and over the rapids. We went round countless corners and through the beautiful scenery looking up at the steep cliffs from the riverside. We stopped part way through for a look at the biggest rapid before aiming straight at it!
We had so much fun and it is now something we will be looking out to do again! Safe to say I’m hooked! We had a cup of tea after peeling off the wet suits and fleeces before jumping back in the car and heading for Lake Louise!
We did manage to record the whole trip with our waterproof action camera, once I get the hang of video editing hopefully I can share some of that!
If you ever find yourself in Golden looking for white water rafting definitely check out Wild Water they were top notch! (Opinions all my own, we paid for the experience ourselves.)
