Cool. it'll be a lot better with 14-15 y/o than 12-13. I was an assistant scoutmaster and I don't think I'd want to take the younger guys on a trip that long.
What was the floating / paddling like at those flows?
We planned on 4 days and 4 nights on the river. We didn't paddle hardly at all (unless it was to go check something out on the other side of the river, or to play around in an eddie). It ended up taking us 3 days (well, a half day, a full day, and a half day). There were 3 adults on this trip, no kids. We left Ruby Ranch at 1 PM on Thurs and we were done by 4 PM on Sat. We could have knocked it out even faster if we had paddled. That being said, we had some pretty fast inflatable kayaks. It would have been a bit slower in a big raft. I have ADHD, and I'm not the type of guy who likes to set up camp at 2 pm and just lounge around for the rest of the day. Every night we pitched camp about an hour before dark.
With those river flows, was there any difficulty finding camp spots?
Yes, it was difficult finding camping spots, but I don't blame it on the water flow, i blame it on the tamarisk. On average, we passed a viable camp spot every two hours or so. The tamarisk has completely choked out most of the shoreline. There were spots that we could tell had camp sites on them a year or two ago, but now the tamarisk was completely overgrown there was no access to these paths. I suppose you could bushwhack through 20' of tamarisk to get to the spots, but we weren't prepared for that. I don't think a lower water level would have made much of a difference unless you were camping 10' from the water. There was one stretch where we went about 3 hours without seeing anything usable for camping. Factor in the fact that there are other people on the river as well, and the size of your group, and this will probably be your biggest problem. Fortunately we only saw 4 other groups on the water with us that trip, so there were enough campsites to go around.
The first night we pulled our boats onto the shore, completely out of the water. The next day, the water level had risen by two feet and the boats were floating in the morning. We hadn't thought to tie them off because we thought the river was already at high flow. Fortunately they were still there, but after that we made sure to tie the boats off. The high water level made it a bit tricky to dock and get out of the boat, since there wasn't usually a shoreline to pull up to, but it was doable.
Are the various inscription sights, ie D. Julien, Launch Marguerite, easy to find from the river?
Sorta. The river map book you recommended was ok, but it didn't really help find the stuff. I was pretty disappointed that it didn't even mark where the river registry was. It lists it and has a picture of it, but it doesn't show where it is on the map. Just relying on the book, we passed a few of these things. Also, when it says stuff like "xxxxxxx formation" I had no clue what that meant. Was it a rock formation? A geologic formation? Ancient cave paintings? No clue. We looked and looked for some of that stuff but never could tell what it was talking about.
We found the D. Julien inscription by just taking a side hike and we happened to stumble upon it. We weren't really looking for it; we had given up on finding the stuff listed in the book. To answer your question, in my experience, the book didn't make them very easy to find. However, if you see a hiking trail off the shoreline, there's a good chance it leads to one of these.
Part 2 coming soon
