About a month ago I had the most brilliant stupid idea of my life. I figured that if you put an air mattress into the Colorado River just below the Longhorn Dam, you could then float the nine-mile bend of the Colorado that ends near the airport and take the bus back to where you started.
Two days later, a pal and I put the plan into action. To my knowledge, no one else has ever attempted this.
I only just developed the paper-analog pictures I took of the experience (didn’t want to get my digital camera wet), so this is the first public documentation of our Colorado River expedition.
Since we had no idea how long it would take to float nine miles, we got up pretty early and loaded the bikes with gear.
Of course no adventure can start before grabbing breakfast tacos.
We put in at the 183 bridge, which has a number of inexplicable bridge supports that have been empty for as long as I’ve been in Austin.
Originally I thought we could float the river on temporary rafts made of inflated garbage bags. And then I tried to inflate a garbage bag and found that they don’t like to stay inflated. So we ended up with some cheap air mattresses.
It didn’t take long to blow them up. And they had the added feature of a drink divot in the arm rest.
Here we are testing the beer cooler. Yes, it floated! Originally the beer cooler was a pair of styrofoam chests used to transport cat insulin.
I got the idea for the mattress expedition after spending an evening (with this same friend) chasing minnows and swimming in the river. At the time, the river was about thigh deep and very swift. As it turns out, the current is highly variable, dependent utterly on the whims of the Colorado River Authority. The day we chose to go mattressing there was hardly any current at all. It was indeed a lazy mattress day.
I have since found the Lower Colorado River Authority webpage that has a real time readout of the river height and current. On the mattressing day the Colorado River had a flow of 75 cubic feet per second. This is equivalent to 400 toilets flushing continuously. For a river though, this is barely a trickle. I watched the website for a few nights and found that they slowly open the floodgates around 5pm, bringing the river flow up to 1400cfs until morning.
The point being that we had to manually paddle our way downstream.
But with some splashing we made it down to an old sewage pipe that crossed the river, which made a perfect place to stop and rest.
And then we essentially walked back. So no grandiose circuit, just a pleasant day spent with the river and some beer. But we still have the air mattresses. It’s just a matter of waiting for the river to have water.