We are incredibly excited to kick off our new company Packraft Colorado and working exclusively with Alpacka Packrafts. For the coming 2022 season, we will be working with our colleagues at Rich Valley Adventures to offer guided days trips down the Roaring Fork River. Moving forward with securing more permits, we also hope to offer trips down a few sections of the Colorado, including hopefully an overnight experience involving backpacking and packrafting the Ruby / Horsethief Canyons of the Colorado. Another offering we hope to be able to provide is alpine lake fishing in the Aspen area. Packrafts are incredibly versatile tools that can help access some amazing, remote locations. Flying fishing from a packraft is an art (and one that I personally haven’t mastered, to say the least…)
We expect the bulk of our operations to be focused on outfitting the growing packraft community, especially that in Colorado. We’ll be renting new model packrafts for all the community’s needs. To start, we’ll be stocking Alpacka Classics and Wolverines. We’ll also have available for rent most of the accessories needed to make your trip a success: spray skirts, paddles, internal storage bags, bow bags, wetsuits, pfds, helmets. Collectively, we have a huge dearth of paddling packrafts on the waterways of Colorado and Utah and cannot wait to share our stoke with you.
Packrafting is the future of water sports in many ways. While not as maneuverable as a kayak, the accessibility is drastically changed. Packrafts can be piloted by almost anyone. It is very important to make sure that as we outfit people with limited, or in many cases no river experience, that we keep safety as our number one concern. We will not be guiding anything bigger than class three, and only those who have proven their prowess can raft class three with us. Our normal guiding operations will take place on a beautiful, class two section of the Lower Roaring Fork river. Our courses will similarly take place here.
We still have a ton of work to do before we are ready for operations this summer, but it’s time to start getting the word and stoke out there!
Noah Zemel
Packraft Colorado