Where Are Your Men? Rafting Western Rivers with The Ladies

Zan grew up hiking, fishing, and camping with her family in the Wasatch and Uinta Mountains of Utah, but she came late to rafting - she was almost fifty. She came even later to this group of women rafters. Although she fell in love with the river on her first trip down the Grand Canyon in her late twenties, she didn't see guiding as a path for her. Instead, she earned a couple of degrees and launched an interesting career in training design. Twenty years later, after a second Grand trip, she realized it was now or never if she wanted to get into rafting. She bought a boat with a couple of girlfriends and that was that. Now Zan has her own boats and gets on the river every chance she gets. She also enjoys doing textile art, writing, hiking, birding, and yoga.

Despite being raised in a non-outdoorsy family in Kentucky, Nikki immersed herself in rivers and the outdoors her entire adult life. Nikki moved west to Utah at twenty, and her first river trip was on the Green River through Desolation Canyon in 1977. She learned whitewater canoeing on the Alpine Canyon stretch of the Snake River. Moving to Seattle for a corporate career didn't stop her from exploring wild rivers, and neither did motherhood. She's paddled rivers of all character from continuous, technical whitewater to free-flowing rain forest rivers. Nikki now lives in Bozeman, Montana, where, when she's not boating, she's hiking, backpacking, biking, writing songs, or skiing.