We arrived in Hope late Friday night and were surprised about the atmosphere and the amount of people here. Hope is not much more than an old goldrush era village still featuring a lot of original log cabins. Furthermore there is a bar called Seaview Bar and a camping just close to the beach – and that’s were everyone gathers in summer over the weekends. The bar features an open-air terrace were bands perform during weekend evenings. Furthermore the close creek is famous amongst locals (meaning people from Anchorage) for salmon fishing. This weekend seemed to be one of the most busiest: sunny, warm weather, a salmon run as well as a pretty good local band playing got a lot of people into the village of Hope. The campground was full and a lot of people just camped along the village streets. It reminded us of what Woodstock probably has looked like (there were also a couple of folks probably stuck in that time really). Just a lot of happy people hanging out everywhere enjoying the weather and themselves! We enjoyed it so much, that we decided to spend 3 nights in Hope until Monday morning.
There was another thing we had to do here: Rafting the Six Mile river! This river is said to be one of the most spectacular rafting rivers in North America! Fortunately there were spots free the time we booked, so we joined a tour in the afternoon!
Now, the difficulty of rapids are indicated with classes. Class 1 being very easy, class 5 quite hard & dangerous, while being the highest class normally done by public tours. Our trip consisted of 3 canyons connected by rather calm river water. The canyons increased in classes from 3 for the first one up to class 5 rapids in the third one.
At the starting point we got an introduction and a safety briefing. We then had to jump into the water to proof our swimming skills, followed by a hundred meters of controlled floating. After that we had to swim towards a boat, were we were pulled out of the water by previously “saved” participants. The dry suit actually mostly kept me dry… I can’t say the same about Marco 🙂
After that hands-on safety training we boarded the rafts and headed downstream! The first canyon was a lot of fun as we even managed to surf a rapid! Compared to Squamish river in Whistler, six mile was much more narrow with less water – the walls in the canyon were at some points only a couple of meters apart from each other.
In the second canyon some of us then managed to fall out of the boat as the boat almost flipped – including me and Marco. We all got pulled in quickly again and had a blast experiencing this additional wet adventure.
After another rather calm, scenic ride down the river the guide prepared us for the third and hardest canyon. Here a couple of rapids are class 5, so we had to be focused and had to follow the paddling commands of the guide. Another more tricky thing in this canyon was, that the rapids weren’t separated by calm pools but just followed one after each other. Hence if you happened to fall out of the boat, you had to make sure to swim back to it as hard as possible in order not to be separated. Otherwise one could end up “swimming” all the rest of the rapids down. Long story short, the rapids were a lot of fun, just one person fell out (or rather got pushed out by another one – no fingers being pointed now). The place where this happened was a class 5 rapid called “Suckhole” – a rather bad spot to be in the water as there was a lot of underwater turbulances resembling a washing maschine. Fortunately, the person was close to the boat, held on to it and finally got pulled in (after the guide was held back from falling in 😂).
What a ride! We surely enjoyed this rafting trip a lot! In the evening we got back to Hope and listened to live music all evening long until the sun set just before midnight!
