Atlas Society Summer Seminar July 2004

In 2004, the summer seminar, my seventh, of The Atlas Society was held at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, one of most geographically spectacular cities on planet earth. TOC used one of my favorite comments on the summer seminar in their 2004 brochure; click on image to left. There were about 200 attendees this year. As usual, there were invigorating and educational lectures morning, afternoon and evening all week. People lecturing in one session are part of the audience in the other. One of the many lecture highlights, was a two part talk on Islam delivered by David Kelley that supplied the philosophical insights into how the Muslim world developed as it did.

Wednesday, the mid point of the week, is a free day and participants self-organize themselves into various activities. I was one of the group of 8 going white water rafting. This was my first time and wow! what an adventure. We drove 90 minutes from Vancouver to the Chilliwack river. We spent almost 4 intensive hours on the Chilliwack River Canyon run, which is graded III to IV plus, surviving 9 miles of constant white water with a lot of paddling. I, one of three, who got flipped out of the raft, made a nice recovery by swimming back to the raft and was hauled aboard. Basically, we were on constant adrenaline for 4 hours. We briefly stopped in the middle of the journey to hike up a hill to jump, one by one, a good 20 feet into the cold surging river, and then we swam like hell to get to the bank before we would be swept downstream. We felt like war buddies at the end of the adventure. Fellow rafters were: Logan Darrow Clements, Heather Demarest, Mike Garrett, Michael Grierson, Lance Moore, Ken Nesmith, and Scott Schneider.