Forearms fully pumped, feet aching far beyond discomfort, head down, and mind shut off; the pain was real. One step after another along a bumpy dirt road, we pulled a fully loaded raft on a homemade trailer, like oxen, in the absolute middle of nowhere. Far below to my left was a pitiful trickle of river water at the bottom of the deep canyon we found ourselves in. To my right was a deteriorating 20-foot-high reinforced concrete wall encasing the rushing canal water traversing its way to the downstream power plant to give its energy to hydropower.
As the intense California sun beat down on our struggling trio, I tried to refrain from thinking about the ground we had covered and the distance we had yet to go before we could drop back into the river and shift the weight of our gear onto the shoulders of the Klamath once more. I thought about pulling out my GPS map to check our mileage but realized I had done so mere minutes ago. This was certainly the hardest I had ever worked to get down a river, but it was worth it.
The Klamath River begins as a trickle at Crater Lake and flows 400 miles through Oregon and California and into the Pacific
