For me it all started late one night around a warm campfire in May of last year. My good friend Bill Sheppel invited my wife Bobbie and I on his 21 day private permit down the Grand Canyon. At first we did not think much about it because we have a daughter in her first year of college and there is no way we could get that much time off work. The gears in my head just kept slowly thinking about how we could make this happen. I told my wife that this is a once in a lifetime trip. She replied that Lauren, our daughter, would be busy at school but she didn’t know if she could go that long without talking to her. So I started talking to people that had been down the Canyon and they all said you gotta go it’s so good you will love it, and of course the ‘It will change your life’. All of this should have told me to just go but the commitment of using all of our vacation for the year (and more) in one pop and sacrificing time away from our family was a very hard decision.

The next day I was talking to my friend Bob about the trip, he had been ten years earlier and this is what he said, “When someone invites you on a trip down the GC, you don’t think about it you just say yes and figure it all out after that.” That evening in mid May I booked the airfare and locked ourselves in for the trip of a lifetime in November. I had five months to work everything out and get all the gear we needed.

At first I was planning to kayak and Bobbie who does not have much whitewater experience was going to ride on a raft, but then I got the ideal that we should buy a Hyside paddlecat (shredder) and we could be together. We had tried a shredder years ago down the New river and did not do that well but I knew we could do it with more practice. So my new quest for adventure was to paddle all 226 miles of the GC with my wife in a shredder, which I have to admit seemed like no big deal at the time(wrong). So I called Bernie from Whitewater Warehouse and told him to order me the paddlecat which did not arrive until late August. By then the New River was -1ft but it was the only water to train for our trip so we hit it the first chance. We were way off line in middle Keeney and I came out and swam, it was not the start we wanted but we were rookies and now we knew it. I thought we would practice on the New some more, but Gauley season started and I was play boating on the Gauley every chance I got. My wife started to get real worried that we were going to get killed on the canyon if we don’t get some more seat time in the Shredder so the only thing I knew was to advance to the Upper Gauley. I convinced her that if we could make it down the upper we would be fine on the GC (she fell for it) so we took our A game with us and surprisingly did pretty well. We did the upper once more and the lower one time all the while getting a little better with each trip.

With only a couple of weeks to go before the trip I made a late night call to the Whitewater Warehouse and had Jeryl order all the last minute gear we needed. On October 30th our launch date, we were ready as we were going to be and 16 of us set out on a trip of a lifetime.

I won’t go into detail about the goings on during the trip because there’s just too many spectacular things to see and do down there, besides that is the point of this article you need to see it for yourself.

We had a vast group of guys and gals from coast to coast with all kinds of backgrounds and it all worked out flawlessly. Though we were all different, the river was our common ground and we were all there to absorb whatever we could from the canyon.

If two working-class, married with children people like us can make the sacrifice and commitment to go on a 21 day wilderness trip anyone can. I will brag a bit because we did reach our goal and paddled all 226 awesome miles with only one flip and without a single fight. If you ever get the chance to go to the Grand Canyon, you gotta go, you will love it! It will change your life but most important JUST GO… it will all work out.

Shawn McClung