Mineral Bottom

This is the road down to Mineral Bottom, our usual put-in point on the Green River. Have you seen that commercial where the guy kisses his wife, walks out his front door and jumps off a cliff to parachute down to his Suzuki SUV? Our triple-threat shuttle driver Sean (river runner, poet, former bodyguard for Suzanne Somers) claimed that this is the cliff the guy jumped off.


Not me, buddy: it's scary enough riding down in a Sean-driven short bus.

In the interest of easy copy the D-blog put on his journalist's hat and researched Sean's claim. He's right. Here's a link to Suzuki's "making of" video. Yes, there's a "making of" video. You can see the Green (and the road) in a number of shots.

Hell is a river

After we launched last week dozens of people were trapped at Mineral Bottom when flooding and rock slides "decimated" (as usually reliable sources put it) the road. I believe they had to be taken out by chopper, though I can't seem to find a published account. In any case, it rained almost two inches in 24 hours while we were on the river, just over a third of the area's normal yearly rainfall. The number of rockslides personally witnessed by the Drunkablog went from zero to about ten on this trip.

Update: Forgot to mention, a "bottom," according to my 1939 Webster's Unabridged, is "low land formed by alluvial deposits along a river." There's also a "Queen Anne Bottom" on the Green, which is invariably and unimaginatively rendered "Queen Anne's Bottom."

(Portrait of Queen Anne from the Liberry of Congress.)

Update II: "Hell is a river." Great title, he said modestly. Now all I have to do is write the screenplay.