Welcome back from a cold January weekend! Here at America’s Rafting Company headquarters, we’ve been gearing up for our summer already. Hard to imagine wearing shorts, sandals and sunscreen when the high is a bone chilling 20 degrees outside and snowing, but summer will be here before we know it and we’ll be ready to put on some white water rafting trips! In order to be ready, we start planning a year or more in advance. We spend the winter keeping up on our social media accounts, emails with past and future clients, gear upkeep and most recently facility upkeep! Phew, winter is almost as busy as summer for us! White water rafting trips take a lot of planning and prep work behind the scenes, so we really do need an entire off season to get caught up and ready to go!
White water rafting trips in Idaho
The big projects that America’s Rafting Company has been taking on lately, are the boat shop and this weekend we began some work to finish our warehouse kitchen and build some more shelving and organization. Parker and I have been racking our brains on how to make the space that we have efficient and useful. This past season, what we had worked, but it could have worked a whole lot better. Pack days at the ARC headquarters (which happen the day before a trip goes out) were chaos! Some of that chaos could be avoided if we had more efficient stations and systems in place. Here’s what our pack day used to look like: I go shopping very early in the morning (we’re talking 6 am, the store is just turning on their open sign) clip board in hand, I get all of our perishable items, dairy and produce. Most of our dry goods are purchased in the beginning of the season and our meat is delivered to the warehouse. After loading the ARC-mobile up
Prepping for white water rafting trips by packing everything into two small rooms!
with oodles of ice, milk and fresh produce, I head back to the warehouse and unload everything, of course I always have donuts for the guides to sweeten the deal! When the car is unloaded, the warehouse becomes a war zone- zucchini and pineapple rolling around, once we even had a giant watermelon drop and crack on the ground which ended up being a sweet sticky mess! Eventually those groceries are packed away in coolers and boxes, ready to go on white water rafting trips the next day. There are 4-6 people milling around the warehouse with checklists flying and reminders piped out to whoever is listening. It was always great fun and very rarely was anything forgotten for the white water rafting trip, it all worked out in the end and if we finished packing early enough, we were awarded an afternoon at Lost Lake Reservoir!
So our plans for the warehouse will include some different stations in different areas of the warehouse, we’ll have a station with open shelving and all of our dry goods, there will be plenty of counter space and storage. We are also re-working part of the prep kitchen, we found that last year we needed more drawers
Prepping for white water rafting trips by packing everything into two small rooms!
and lots more counter space and you guessed more storage! So, Parker and I have started work on what will be a new and improved warehouse, in the meantime, above is what an entire rafting company looks like shoved into two very small spaces. Good thing we played a lot of Tetris growing up, we’ve needed that expertise to stack boats and boxes and coolers and life jackets and sleeping bags and dutch ovens and who knows what else! Keep your eyes posted for updates on construction, organization and white water rafting trip planning!
