59 - 9/4/2010 - Tieton

Below the Put-in

Every summer, I look forward to running the Tieton. It's not a particularly exciting run, but it is a lot of fun and I get to experiment with different boats. One of the side benefits is that I get to listen to a couple of audio books in the car, because each week there's at least 5 hours of driving to and from the river.

The weather at the Tieton is predictably unpredictable, or maybe it's unpredictably predictable. It will probably be really hot one weekend, and it will probably rain really hard one weekend, and it will probably be really cold one weekend, but there's no way to know when this will happen. I've been there Labor Day weekend and half froze to death, and another year sweated the whole weekend.

This year, I brought a couple of boats to try out. On this first day, I brought the Aire Outfitter, which had recently been modified some more. I had a friend add D-rings to allow me to raise up the backrest a bit. This made a big difference.