2020 Season Recap

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That’s it for us in 2020! Certainly a weird year with Covid acting as a 3rd wrench (after weather and water) but everything generally went about as well as could be hoped for.

We struggled with water levels just about every other week as a large storm would come through the watershed just as the river was about back to normal. We made a few questionable calls on whether or not to cancel trips but in the end, we only lost three weeks to high water cancellations. Had there been even one more rainstorm in addition to our regular weekly dumping of rain, it’s quite likely we’d have lost eight more weeks of our eighteen week season (that’s how tight the water management was this summer). I think we may have gotten low enough to touch the median water level mark twice all year. Climate science has been predicting these bigger midwestern storms for more than a decade and we’ve seen it happening real time the past 3 years or so. I don’t expect this struggle to get easier but I’m hopeful that the hydraulics of higher water will lead to higher sandbars and we’ll get some kind of equilibrium. There’s some anecdotal evidence of this already happening but also maybe some wishful thinking.

The water struggles came as a surprise to a lot of people in the area since weather wise, it was about as good a year as you could ask for. We only had two good storms come through over a weekend and not a ton of big headwinds or severe weather. The trouble came from up north where water uptake isn’t as strong in the forests of northern Wisconsin and they just kept getting heavy, regular storms.

Covid, on the other hand, turned out to be a good thing for us overall. For all outdoor pursuits actually. Tons of interest from people where many of their usual options are shutdown and, similar to previous economic recessions, a lot of ‘close to home’ travel which is good for regional recreation destinations (i.e. us). After a very slow start – down 90%YOY at one point from what was already a washed out season, we ended up crushing our previous season best, mostly due to a relatively huge increase in weekday trips. I don’t know how well our Covid policies played into this but given the doubling of our usual cancellation rate (and associated refund rate) plus not getting a single report of a positive test or contact tracing request, I think we made it through pretty responsibly.

Thanks to all of you that came out with us this season! Already looking forward to 2021! (And taking reservations now)

-Ryan