Why Colorado is Better than California

Whenever I say how much better Colorado is than California I often get one rebuttal...no ocean or beaches. Well, there's the winter too but our winters are actually fairly mild. I never really liked the beach growing up, and I had an experience this weekend that makes me think I'm not missing anything here.

I went river rafting in the Arkansas river down Brown's canyon and the Royal Gorge. It was high water weekend and the water was VERY high. Due to the water level we hit multiple Class 5 rapids. We got in the day before Royal Gorge was closed due to too high of water. Anyway, on to the list of why river rafting is better than surfing:

1. Minimal learning curve.
2. Enjoy the company of others.
3. HUGE hits and waves.
4. No yucky, salty water.
5. No need to be self-conscious about body image...everyone out here has farmer tans :-)
6. Less work and more payoff.
7. Cool names of rapids. We went through things like Sledgehammer, Wall Slammer, Boat Eater, Widowmaker, Tombstone, Whale's Tail, Raft Ripper, Seidel's Suckhole, Pinball, etc. What does California have? Zuma beach?
8. At least for California water the runoff isn't that much colder.

Yes, one valid point is that the beach is free, or cheap. Okay, I'll give you that. Doesn't outweigh all the other stuff though.

Here's some perspective. This video shows Seidel's Suckhole at 2,200 cubic feet per second. We ran it today at 3,7000 cfs! Imagine it at over one and a half this size. It was awesome! We didn't tip or lose anyone in our group on this one, but we did on some of the other ones :-) These videos aren't our group, just giving you an idea of what we did.

I took a nice little swim right at the start of sunshine falls. We had some technical difficulty and hit the wall on the right side of the video below. I went under and the first thought I has was, "they told me not to panic...so I'll just chill until the life jacket pops me back up." I eventually came back up, on the other side of the boat. After a bit they pulled me up.