The most important item to bring rafting … a personal water bottle!
Have you ever been to the river, dived deep under the water, and explored the rocks on the bottom? How often did you find some man made object stuck down there, endlessly trying to blend in? Now imagine, how many things might get dropped in a big rapid, where the water is always moving too fast to allow anyone access to their plastic trash again. Concern for what gets added to our beautiful rivers has always been high on our list of priorities. Raft California already does it’s best to provide and encourage sunglasses chums, to help keep our clients and ecosystems happy. We also dedicate ourselves to many other recommendations that keep objects out of the boat that could end up stuck in the river for years. Not to mention each boat has a netted bag to keep such random loose things secure. But we, like every other rafting company we know, were forgetting to look deeper than just our direct involvement with preventing pollution.
Throughout the rafting community it has been a long treasured tradition to provide everyone with fresh cold drinks at take out. Not only is it a critical convenience to allocate time to pack up all of the gear and mount the busses. But anyone who has ever been rafting on a hot day, understands the bliss of an ice cold water bottle greeting them just as they return to land. Did you catch that? For YEARS, every company, every day, on every trip, giving every client their own plastic water bottle. Can you imagine the math of how much pollution that is in just one season!?!? We did. For us, it was around 10,000 water bottles after our 6 month season was over. Unacceptable, we think.
Solution?
Get rid of the one time use water bottles. We require our guests to all carry a personal water bottle for every rafting trip we run. Staying hydrated is the main purpose, but by using a reusable water jug we are helping keep thousands of water bottles out of the river as well as out of landfills. This season we had 32oz. Reusable Rtic bottles for our guests to purchase at our main outposts. Large ice water gots were also continually filled at our camp for our employees and guests to refill personal bottles with treasured cold water.
We are very proud to become a little more Green, just like our boats. We can only hope that all of the other colored boats out there soon gain the courage to follow in our footsteps. Overall dear earth dwellers, please be sure to do your part to reduce, reuse, and recycle.
