by Sarahlee Lawrence, River Rafting Guide | I’m a farmer and a river guide. When I leave the work at the farm, I head to work on the river. But sometimes its time to get gone. For the first time, maybe ever, I went on a vacation for me. No rivers, horses, vegetables, tractors, snow, or dust…. Just me and a couple Athleta bikinis headed to Thailand…

by Sarahlee Lawrence, Outdoor Adventurer
You wake up to the sound of surf on the southern Mexican coast. Your hair is heavy with salt from the day before and eyes hazy in the dawn. You’ve been here for a week and the surf continues to break clean all day and all night, so you’re not surprised by the waist-high waves peeling off the little rocky point just beyond your tent…

by Sarahlee Lawrence, River Rafting Guide
It doesn’t seem to matter what I’m doing, from running rivers, to farming, to hiking, to biking, to running… I just have more fun in a skirt. It’s something about my legs being free, or maybe (speaking of Chi) the skirt opens the connection to the circulating life energy inherent in the earth…

by Sarahlee Lawrence, River Rafting Guide
I had been fighting the Colorado River for a hundred and eighty miles. The river swatted my boat and hit me sideways. I strained against the oars, trying to hold my line. Every rapid felt like a chaotic pummeling. I was just a sophomore in college and had never rowed a raft before in my life…

by Sarahlee Lawrence
Inquisitive, reticulated giraffes walked gracefully up to us while our horses grazed. Some days we slipped through a herd of sixty or more, towering like a cathedral. I rode where the only trails are elephant trails, the sky is so vast it seemed to wrap around me, and the Southern Cross and Big Dipper sat in the same sky. Horses carried me through the still wild bush of the Laikipia District in Kenya…

By Sarahlee Lawrence, River Rafting Guide

I can’t smell anything. I can’t even smell myself. No wood smoke burns my nose. Most days, the sour smell of the cardboard plant freezes in the ice crystals inside my nose. But today I smell nothing…