Every year my brother is kind enough to organize a family float trip near his home in Leavenworth. It's always a great time, lying in the sun, drinking his beer (if you're ever near there, check out Icicle Creek Brewery!), and in general just relaxing.
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Pros: It's beautiful and the start and end are on either side of the town, so if you're staying in Leavenworth it's easily accessible. The water is cool and clear and there are just enough fun little rapids to keep things interesting.
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Cons: It is packed with people (my sister-in-law said there were about 2000 people per day floating this section) so it isn't exactly peaceful and isolated.
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Overall: A great time with some fun people watching, but not where you want to go if you just want to get away from it all.
Trips
Google Maps is failing me again. The place where Icicle Road crosses the Wenatchee River is where we put in. The Leavenworth Public Boat Launch is where we took out.
8/5/17
Like I said above, every year my brother organizes a big family float trip. For the last few years it's been down the Wenatchee River going through Leavenworth.
This was the mob at the put-in site. You can pick out my family putting their gear in the water if you look closely.
The river is cool and calm for the most part with a reasonably swift current. There were a few little "riffles" that were fun to paddle through. It did remind me that my ability to read a river is incredibly rusty and that I really need to practice.
This is the first "rapid" you come across. It's about as turbulent as the water gets. If you go as late in the season, as we tend to, bumping your boat or your butt on rocks is actually a worse problem.
Lori, Diane, and Zane. Yes, Zane is riding on top of a cooler full of beer that's strapped to an inflatable stand-up paddle board. It's not the strangest craft we'd see all day.
There are a couple of different choices to make as you go down the river. If you look at the map up top, you can see a couple of unnamed islands as well as a bigger one called Blackbird Island. If you plot your route out ahead of time (or have a local) you can make your trip longer or shorter. Since my nephew Zane had to get to work in town, we took the shorter route each time.
Dean and Quinn on the river.
The whole family where we stopped for lunch.
There are a lot of sandy beaches on the shore where you can stop for lunch. The biggest trick is finding one that isn't already completely full of people. According to Dean and Diane, when there's a drought and the water levels are too low for whitewater rafting all the rafting companies do float trips on the popular rivers. That wasn't a problem this year, but there were still plenty of people.
A view down the backside of Blackbird Island. You can see some of the apartments in town.
Dean and Diane with the "big fancy new hotel" in the background.
The only tricky bit here was the end. There are two places we could have chosen for the take-out point. The first is right in town and has a long, windy, single lane road going down to a parking lot with too few spots for the number of people who want to use it. But, because it's the most convenient to town nearly everyone uses it, causing no end of hilarity as people try to drive up the road while others try to drive down it. The second spot (East Leavenworth Road City Boat Ramp) is the one we chose. It's slightly out of town, but the major problem is that if you go around Blackbird Island you have to go from one side of the river to the other, across a fairly strong current. If we hadn't been warned about it in advance it would have been pretty miserable to deal with. As it was, we just aimed upstream as we were going across and made a nice arc over to the ramp.
Looking back at Blackbird Island from the boat ramp. There was still quite a big of smoke from the forest fires in B.C.
Taking our gear out at the boat ramp.
And that's it. Just a nice relaxing float with our family and several thousand of our best friends. Like I said, we've done this float before and it's always a great time. I only wish it had lasted a bit longer.