We went out on the Atnarko River looking for grizzly bears, which is, of course, the sort of sentence that makes a trip sound immediately dramatic. In truth, though, what I remember most vividly from our two rafting trips with Kynoch Adventures is not the sudden appearance of a bear, nor even the remarkable sight of salmon crowding the river beneath us, but the quiet. It was the kind of quiet that is increasingly difficult to encounter in modern life, not an absence of sound so much as the absence of everything artificial. There were no engines, no traffic, no electronic hum, no hurried voices pushing us toward the next thing. There was only the soft pull of the river against the raft, the occasional dip of an oar, the splash of a salmon breaking the surface, birds calling somewhere beyond the trees, and the almost immeasurable stillness of a valley surrounded by mountains.
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