My white water rafting websites

For the record, here’s the story on how my three whitewater rafting websites came to be. The idea for the first website, http://www.whitewatercampsites.com/ started years ago on our first Main Salmon rafting trip. My friend Julie won the permit and I accompanied her to the permit holder meeting in the little ranger office at Corn Creek. We bid for and got Alder Creek as our first campsite. Back then the rangers didn’t consider group size as carefully as they do now. While we won Alder Cr. fair and square, the head guide for a large commercial group asked us to give it to him because they were such a large group. He didn’t offer anything in return, but the guy was pleasant, sincere, and made a good sales pitch. He suggested that a great alternative that would more closely fit our group size was Fawn Creek. Fawn was not reserve-able, but sounded nice, with a stream running through the beach. Others in the office nodded. So we caved, just to be nice, and not get our first Main Salmon trip off on a contentious note.
They launched before us and later that day, as we floated by Alder, which is a major beach with afternoon shade (the temp was something like 106F that day), watching them all playing in the water and enjoying that massive beach, we realized that we had gotten the raw end of that deal. Oh well, onward to Fawn. But the situation became worse when we arrived at Fawn about 2 minutes after another group, and our plan fell apart. Fawn did look great too, but it was not to be ours that night. So we wandered downstream until eventually taking the campsite now known as Grotto. We were totally cramped that night, and kicked ourselves for a few days about giving up Alder to such a flaky “plan B”. Being our first river trip on the Main Salmon, we didn’t know what the various sites looked like. We just stumbled along and got stung. So that was the spark that eventually led to my rafting trip campsites website. A year or two later some guys at work showed me some code they were using for posting their own online photo albums (this was ‘do-it-yourself’, before Flickr and other social networking sites). I grabbed a copy, doctored it up, and launched the website. If you go there, and open the first “Past Cover Photos” page, way down at the bottom is the photo of Magpie Creek camp from that same Main Salmon trip, that was the first cover photo.
At the time, I thought that was a pretty striking picture! Looks pretty drab now, given all the other cool shots that people have sent me. The site has come a long way since. Over the years dozens of folks have sent me photos and I’ve added many hundreds more of my own. Today, there are more than 400 campsites on rivers throughout the west, thousands of photos of rivers, campsites, and folks having a great time on rafting trips. And many people have added their own comments about various campsites,which is what I really like to see.

It’s been a labor of love and I go there myself before each trip to help me figure out our itinerary. I know a lot of people do the same, and I get a few 'atta-boy' emails that are really satisfying too. It’s been a lot of fun on my end and I’m glad it’s worked out so well. For those curious, I make about $1 per day in Google advertising. Before I put the ads in, it was a nagging question. Now I know the answer. No big deal. But ads do pay the domain and hosting costs.
My goal for the future of the campsites website is to apply the new Microsoft Silverlight 2.0 technology to present the photos in a much more vivid and immersive fashion. That’s the goal for next year, anyway. All the photos are out there in their full resolution, so it's a resource that deserves to be exposed in as cool a way as I can do it.