Greetings from Scullbinder Ranch!
packraft flyfishing on the animas River yesterday. we'll be offering courses in 2025! 
Some great clips from our amazing dark canyon expedition course. Thanks kat, eric & Maria for being awesome!
Gratitude for YOU
It’s the end of our season, and we are grateful for both an abundant and fun year we had with y’all. Thank you for making Four Corners Guides possible! We really couldn’t do it without your trust in us. Sooo happy autumn. With this email, we want to share some of the biggest highlights of our year, and some ways you can give back if you are so inclined.
Clips from our vary first lgbtq+ course this summer, supported by the Armida Huerta Adventure fund!
The Armida Huerta Adventure Fund!
Steve, Tami Graham and I started a new non-profit project, which we are managing under the umbrella of Mancos Valley Resources. We ran our first course. Andddd we held our first farm-to-table fundraiser dinner October 19th. We raised $3000 toward scholarships. But that’s soon going to nearly double because…
Alpacka Raft Matching Grant!
Exciting news!!! Alpacka Raft has offered us a $2500 matching grant for the Fund.
Thanks to alpacka raft's Thor (green shirt) and Sarah (big smile) Tingey for their matching grant of $2500!!
We would love so much for y’all to donate. Please do so through this link, and specify in the comments section that it is for the “Armida Huerta Adventure Fund Scholarships.” These scholarships will pay 100% toward one course for LGBTQ+ folks and one for black, indigenous and Latino women through Four Corners Guides in 2025. Plus we’re offering scholarships to anyone in these communities wanting to take packrafting and bikepacking courses with other guide services. The goal is to eventually help people purchase the gear they need to do these adventure on their own.
Our 1st Women's course wtih Jule Harle
Women’s Courses!
We ran our first women’s courses, and two out of three sold out. OMG! Yay! Lizzy wasn’t planning on guiding, but her packrafting mentor, the incredible Kent Ford, told her she needed to. Not enough women teaching packrafting! He said. Ok, ok!
However, for our first Level 2 women’s course, we brought down Jule Harle to be the lead guide. She’s one of the most accomplished packraft instructors in the industry. Jule not only helped develop the American Canoe Association Packraft Instructor Certification curriculum, but she also runs Alaska Packraft School, a successful guide service out of Alaska. Jule is awesome, and we had a blast. Our fall ladies course in Moab was also super fun (Instagram post above!)
Our 3/4-mile "driveway" flooded at the Weber Creek River crossing. Check out that surf wave!
Scullbinder Ranch Updates
We finished base camp!!! Well almost… The new greenhouse is nearly done. It will supply food for our Ranch-based courses in 2025! And Steve built a fabulously beautiful (of course) equipment shop (out of all repurposed materials) to maintain our gear. And, the main house, where we feed y’all and have great hang-out sessions, is finished. Woohoo! Oh yeah, and Steve got a new tractor!
White CAnyon Flooding 😮
Crazy Storms & Our 1st Cancelled Course Ever 😮
In other news, we thought we’d lose all the leaves in the storm last weekend. It was so intense it shut down our last Bikerafting Course! Check out the video of White Canyon flooding. We weren’t going to paddle there, but you can see the intensity of the storm in the flash flood! We rarely postpone trips due to weather. But this was a force majeure.
Packrafting the Mancos!
However, now it’s calm and gorgeous again, and the leaves are in full peak down here.
packrafting the Mancos River!
And all the rain storm caused the Mancos River to flash flood over a few days. So we got to packraft a short section of it, which we can access from our property and Bureau of Land Management lands. We feel so lucky to be able to packraft from our backyard, even if only during flash flood events. There are A LOT of those down here in the middle of nowhere. One earlier this fall nearly destroyed our road. I’ve included a clip of the surf wave that briefly blocked our exit 
Full Schedule Available!
So now that the season is over, we are… well ready to launch into next year. Now that we run International trips, our off season is pretty brief—November and December. But that’s OK. We are super stoked to be returning to Chiapas, Mexico, for a second time in January. We’ll be running one course for clients January 25-February 2, and a local’s course January 18-19. Plus, we’re bringing down Sarah Carr to certify a group of Mexicans in Wilderness First Aid (an abridged version of Wilderness First Responder certification).
Plus, we have courses to New Zealand with Huw Miles of Packrafting Queenstown, February 15-25, and Patagonia, Chile, with Waldo Aguayo of Scouting Rios, March 15-23.
Check out our full schedule of courses! It may shift a bit, as we are still getting our Swiftwater Rescue Certification courses and Level 4 Advanced Packrafting Courses scheduled with Jeff Creamer. Stay tuned!
We hope you are enjoying life as much as we are!! And if you’re not, come visit us or take a course with us. We’ll cheer you up. Packrafting is FUN. Life is sweet.
Big hugs,
Doom & Lizzy