alpine adventures, wenatchee river rafting

Thank you Wenatchee river rafting crew for being so great with us! Our group from Google Seattle had a blast - the best ever team event! You guys exceeded all expectation and we'll certainly come rafting with you again :-)!

On July 6th, my family was visiting from Illinois and I wanted to give them an adventure unique to Washington state. Because Riverside Park in Cashmere, the meeting location, was teeming with hundreds of people and numerous raft companies, I feared we were going to have a "cattle-car" river trip. When we finally located Alpine Adventures' crew, we were pleased to find out that our 2pm launch had only 12 people in two rafts. Our family of 6 were all in one raft.Our guide, Scott, started off by seating us the best way to balance the paddle power on both sides. I really appreciated Scott's appraisal of our capabilities before we launched into the current. He had us perform some of his commands, recognized that we were strong paddlers (no "lilly dippers", as he said), willing to coordinate with one another and quick to respond to his commands. This meant he could take us through waves where other more tentative groups couldn't safely maneuver. As we progressed down the river and he gained more information about our abilities, he seemed to let us do more fun maneuvers, but always kept safety first.We made a nice lunch stop on a shady gravel bar. Other raft groups passed while we lunched and we noted the large number of rafts in many groups; as well as, some rafts with more then 6 people, which meant that some had to sit in the middle instead of being able to paddle. In these other groups, there seemed to be a number of raft guides struggling to navigate. Scott told us that group size & number of rafts in an Alpine Adventures trip are smaller than the other companies. Orion and BlueSky were a couple of the companies that I noticed with large groups of people who didn't appear to know each other. Speaking for ourselves, we enjoyed our smaller group and the individual attention.It seems that intensity of any group's river experience with Alpine Adventures will depend on the guide's assessment of the group's capabilities. A trip will probably depend on the least comfortable, least capable person in the group, along with the ability of the group to work as a unit. This approach gave me confidence in this company.While we were having lunch another Alpine Adventures group with 6-7 rafts also went by. Scott explained that Alpine Adventures also offers a trip in which people get picked up in the Seattle area, have a river trip, followed by a BBQ at a restaurant and then shuttled back to Seattle. Hence, you can choose multiple ways to go on an Alpine Adventures trip.