room for error. It would be a challenge to make it through The Otter Slide unscathed, but if there is one thing we all knew, it was that we had to try. Now before we get into the particulars of what happened on that Class V Rapid, it’s important for you to know some more of the details. You see, our whitewater rafting experience that day was much different than a typical rafting experience. When most people go whitewater rafting, they sign up at a whitewater adventure center (or someplace like that), they pay for the trip and are outfitted with all the right gear: life jacket, helmet, wetsuit, and paddle. Then a trained and certified whitewater rafting guide takes the group up to a river where they get into a giant raft. One of these rafts usually holds six or eight, maybe even ten people. They put it into the river, and the guide directs them down the river, steering them around all the hazards and taking them safely to the end. Our experience was not like this. We had a four-man raft. It’s small. Think of the difference between a car tire running over a little bump in the road and a shopping cart wheel going over that same bump. We were in a “shopping- cart-wheel“size raft, it’s significantly more intense. On top of that, there was no one handing out gear, or helping us pick out helmets. Among the four of us, we had snowboard helmets, wakeboard helmets, and whitewater helmets. One time, on an earlier rafting trip, Zach was complaining about how cold his hand was getting. It wasn’t until half way down the river that we realized he was wearing a fleece glove, which was literally soaking up the frigid water and making his hand go numb. Needless to say, we didn’t have the nice matching helmets and paddles that the big rafts have; we had a pile of random gear scraped from wherever we could find it. The biggest thing we were missing, however, was a guide. I was sitting in the guide’s spot on the raft, and I
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