Daring River Challenge: A Lifetime Adventure on the Truckee Awaits! Three of us traveled to Carson City, Nevada for a week and did all types of activities in the area. One of the highlights of the trip was four-hours of Crazy White-Water Rafting on the Truckee River with Tahoe Whitewater Tours.

Let’s Go!

The Outfitters

There are a few different rafting companies in the Lake Tahoe area. Tahoe Whitewater Tours was our river rafting outfitter. The tour company has been in operation since 1994 and is highly rated by their customers. Tahoe Whitewater Tours has over 20 years of experience as whitewater outfitters that specialize in rafting, kayaking, float tube adventures and most importantly, good old-fashioned fun.

Tahoe Whitewater Tours have experienced river guides with different raft trips available including half-day, all-day, and a two-day overnight camping adventure. They have rafting trips on three different rivers in the area – Truckee River, North Fork of the American River, and the Carson River. Each one of these rivers pose different challenges and differing levels of rapids – from Class 1 rapids through Class 4 rapids. Each trip is an extraordinary adventure to explore.

If you are an avid outdoorsman and want to work as a river rafting guide, Tahoe Whitewater Tours has river rafting guide classes available every spring. After completion of the 11-day river running course, you are eligible to be hired by them or a number of other rafting tour companies nationwide.

Our Guide

Randy’s nephew, David, was our river guide for the trip, and he is a seasoned pro! This section of the river runs through Class 2 rapids, Class 3 rapids, and even a Class 4 rapid during the journey. This is his fourth year of being a river guide for Tahoe Whitewater Tours.

Our guide knows the river well and can tell you about the early history of the area with the Native Americans that lived here, he can tell you stories about the early pioneer history, as well as the early history of roads and bridges with the advent of early automobile touring of the area.

The guide David also knows about the plants and wildlife along this section of the river. Occasionally they may spot a black bear, coyote, or deer near the river. The river is known as a fly-fishing area, with anglers along the banks or wading in the river in different spots. Our guide pointed out some migratory birds that are in the area, some for all season, others just migrating through either north or south depending on the season.

We were fortunate that our raft only had the three of us in our group and our guide. Today it is a small group and is perfect for the river and storytelling adventures!

The Truckee River

We took the Truckee River half-day, seven-mile trip from Boca to Floriston. This route include Class 2 and Class 3 rapids, and because of the high waters from the late snow finished the trip with a Class 4 rapids named “Jaws”.

The Truckee River is a river of the Eastern Sierras mountain range along the California and Nevada borders. The river is one of the rare U.S. rivers that flows in a northeasterly direction. The Truckee River is 121 miles (195 km) long and is the sole outlet of Lake Tahoe. The river empties into Pyramid Lake in the Great Basin area. The river’s waters are an important source of irrigation along its route.

This river is important for the forests, vegetation, and wildlife along its waterways. The whole area’s ecosystem is dependent on the flowing waters from the snow melt of the winter and the spring’s and summer’s rainfalls. Many animals put their nests or dens close to the river, and eat the fish of the river.

The Route and the Rapids

Our route today is seven miles and will take around four hours. We start out with a short bus ride to the starting point. As well as the bus, there was a truck and trailer pulling a dozen eight-man rafts. We pulled out at the starting point of the river. It was a steep hike down to the banks of the river. The guides had an inventive way of getting the boats in the water easily.

First, there is a short safety meeting on the banks of the river. Next we are assigned our river guide and our raft and the groups made their way to claim their raft and start the journey! The first part of the trip is a nice relaxing journey through calm waters where rafters can leave their rafts and go for a quick swim. Soon we will hit the real rapids of the river and it is all business!

We go through several short Class 2 and Class 3 rapids after the smooth waters. We are guided through the waters masterfully by our guide, and the three of us passengers only paddled for short bursts on his direction. Randy and I were sitting in front and of course we got soaked on some of the rapids runs! The day was warm, so the cold water was a nice relief.

Our guide would tell us about the different rapids as we came upon them and what our strategy would be gliding through them. Each of the rapids was a little different and there may be different strategies depending on the boulders in the river and the water speeds around them.

Coming upon one of the rapids, our guide told us we would go over the rapids and turn the raft around and wave surf on the running water. We followed his directions and were right up against the rushing waters and stayed in one place as if we were surfing. His plan worked perfectly, and we could stay in that position as long as we wished.

Photography on the River

Tahoe Whitewater Tours hire Chris Mortimer of Basecamp Adventure Photography to be their photographer. He is with the group at the beginning and gets photos of our safety meeting and the start of the trip. As we take off in the rafts, Chris will go down the river to preselected photography spots where he can get photos of each of the rafts and their occupants.

He will take photos of any wildlife, flowers, and river landscapes along the way as well. But the best part is he will sit above some of the challenging rapids and get great action photos as each raft goes through them. He does quick edits on the photos and has a slideshow ready when we head back to our cars on the bus trip. Those same photos are available to each raft for an additional fee.

Before the trip started, I asked about taking my GoPro 10 with me. They said they would not advise it as while we are going through the rapids you may lose it. I then asked our guide if he had a helmet-mount for a GoPro, and he said he did. My solution was to keep the GoPro either in my hand or in my pocket until we got to the best rapids.

Before the rapids, we pulled over to shore and our guide fastened the GoPro to his helmet mount and off we went. We ended up with some great video, but had a slight malfunction towards the end where our video was on time-lapse instead of video. It was actually a funny mistake, and we got some cool video from the time-lapse portion at the end parts of the rapids, including the “Jaws” rapids. You can see this in the second video below this article.

Daring River Challenge

The last set of rapids was a Class 4 because of the high waters from the snow melt and was aptly named “Jaws”! This is a known set of rapids that will spill out rafts of all of their occupants, and this trip was no exception. Two rafts were flipped on this set of rapids; the first casualty was a raft from a competing rafting company and then shortly after we navigated the rapids successfully, a raft from our company spilled as we and several others watched! Other rafts from our rafting company were waiting for this scenario and all the people were rescued safely and brought back to their boat.

This was an awesome raft trip and I highly recommend using Tahoe Whitewater Tours for a trip on the Truckee River or any of the surrounding rivers that they serve. Hopefully I can join them again myself!