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Show Set Yourself Free Run By John Harrington The waters of many rivers course through my soul. Rivers are alive, they have allowed the buman race to spread across the globe. I seek them, have sought them, studied them and have, at the rarest and purest moments of my life, been absorbed by them. | n the United States—the Colorado, Yampa, Green, Salmon, Payette, Deschutes, Missouri, Madison, Gallatin, Rogue, Dirty Devil, Snake, Henry's Fork, Beaverhead, Yellowstone, | Columbia, Willamette and more, many more, have envelopedm I have run ae headwaters of the Potomac and Hudson, flipped a canoe on Alberta's wild upper Bow, chased fish through the swift currents of Vancouver Island's famed Campbell, rode my one-man inflatable down the fast, rocky, freezing Elwha on Washington's Olympic Peninsula. I paddled the Shotover, Waikato, Waiau and Kawarau in New Zealand, flew in a jet boat up that's country's big Rakaia, ran the Makal amid monkeys and iguanas in Belize, waded the Rio Grande into Mexico near Big Bend and swamped a dugout log canoe on the Rio de la Pasion in Guatemala. For all my travels through some wild, remote and dangerous runs, | nearly drowned in the Wood River in downtown Ketchum; Idaho while’ fly fishing) "16° My attraction toward’ flowing ‘water fas Mountain’ Pine Ridge last winter—and been an obsession. I have traveled on and fly found an empty Belikin Beer bottle in the fished so many streams, there is no way to weeds—to me, a tragedy of epic proportion. remember all their names or locations. Why do people destroy rivers and their Each river, stream, creek, branch and environs? slough has had its own mystery and allure. Because, they have never run one—for, if I have been brought to tears by their they had, they would never do anything to beauty and I have suffered a broken heart harm even the smallest trickle of water or its when I have seen what has happened to some shorelines again. of them at the hands of man. It's safe to say no single feature of nature I helped clean sludge oil off of rooftops in has had amore profound, shaping effect on Pottstown, Pa. after the wide, beautiful my life than the’“ river.-My personal time line Susquehanna flooded out an oil refinery in is marked by each and every interaction I 1972 and put the town under 25 feet of have had with these bloodstreams of the land. water. I saw the Arthur Kill between New If you have never taken the time to allow Jersey and Staten Island, once one of the yourself to be pulled into "river time," your great migratory bird wetland rivers on Earth, -life is incomplete. burst into flames after one-too-many dumpFor those of you who have, you know. ings of petrochemical waste. Those of us who live in the West still have I took a swim at the base of the 1,000- a chance to experience the river environment foot Roaring Creek waterfall in the Belize in a variety of spectacular settings—some guarded by national park and wilderness boundaries, or vast, hard-to-access roadless areas like Desolation Canyon on the Green. If you have not run a river—you must. If you have, but it's been a long time, it is now time to journey once again: I will stay close to home and I will try not to repeat what excellent books like the Utah River Runner's Guide have to say. You can purchase plenty of material on rivers of the West—or the world—at any wellstocked bookstore. Additionally, I don't want to rate or recommend one professional river outfitter over another. You can firid’out everything you need to know in that area by phoning the Utah Travel Council at 801-538-1467 and getting a copy of Raft Utah Magazine. Remember— some are better, far better, than others. Investigate. The key to hooking up with a good outfitter is asking questions, lots of All You Can Eat Sushi Monday & Tuesday $25 Wednesda 2 for 1 Dinner Entrees Located at the WMarriott Summit Watch |