Llamas, Anyone?
by Robert Langley

My Favoite Paddling Partner

by Donna Grimes

Anyone who has paddled with Bill and me from 1994 until 2003 knew our favorite paddling partner, our dog Dancer.

Dancer was a small mix of Welsh Corgie and probably Shelty and Dancer learned to enjoy the river as much as the rest of us. She learned to sit when "Mom" Donna decided to surf and to run down the side of the bank when the waves were too big and Dad and Mom would run them and pick her up at the end of the rapids.

Dancer even inspired Ann Derby to write a song about her

High Water Dog (Dancer’s Blues)
By Ann Derby

We wanted to canoe the river
But we’d never seen the river so low
We were looking at the bones of the riverbed
Where the rapids used to flow
We thought of better days with surfing waves
As we dragged out boats along
Only one of us was satisfied
And that was Bill and Donna’s dog, oh yeah
She was a happy dog.

When the river’s up it’s tough on a pup
You know her legs just ain’t that long
And if the water’s deep she could be swept away
Because the current can be so strong
But in a dried-up situation
Lord, it ain’t no thing
She was a high-water dog in that low-water river
She was the River Queen, oh yeah
She was the River Queen.

She was everyone's friend when evening came and we sat around the campfire.

We miss Dancer as she had to be put to sleep from a broken back in 2003, giving us a broken heart.