A Buzzard Trip - The San Juan Invitational

Fairly decent drive to Sand Island with forgetting that Utah is on DST being the only glitch which put everything an hour behind the planned time. That resulted in my expected arrival time of 3-4 PM becoming iffy. Since TL and permit holder Andrew did not arrive until well after dark, turned out to be a non-issue. Everyone on this trip was a total stranger to me. Met Charles at the ramp where he was rigging his raft. Only took an hour or so to inflate and bare-bones rig my cat. One large commercial group setting up plus one fully configured private boat on the ramp. That boat turned out to be Ken and Terrie. No one from any boat had ever met someone from another boat. We were all a bit leery on how this was going to work out but we did just fine.

The BLM Monticello office (the new 2017 BLM web page) serves as the river manager. Valles ran my solo shuttle and although $75 is much higher than a few years ago, not bad for essentially a taxi service from Mexican Hat to Sand Island. Jim Hardin continues to run the lower canyon shuttle. I am not sure of what the current price for the longer shuttle is.

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