My family went to the Kah-nee-ta resort near Warm Springs, OR for Memorial Day weekend. They said the river was too cold to do kayaking, but there was this activities stand that was booking kayaking trips out on Lake Simtusus, so we booked that. Overall we enjoyed the trip: the people were nice, the kayaks in good condition, and the lake was beautiful. However there were things about the business practices that compared relatively unfavorably to other such vendors we have used for other trips.
1. The lady who booked the trip with us asked if we could escort 2 other guests staying at the Kah-nee-ta resort to the kayak staging area. We've never been asked to do a vendor's shuttling for them. It seemed odd that they would want us to open our vehicle up to total strangers. Not that we wouldn't want to if they were nice people, but still.
2. We were told to show up at 1pm at the staging area, which we did, but we didn't actually end up leaving for the lake until almost 2pm. We like to pack a lot of activities into our vacation, so the extra waiting around was a little disappointing.
3. Three of the guides we had seemed to be minors, as far as I could tell from their appearance, behavior, and demanor. Nice kids, but if you had the interactions we had with them, "trained and certified professional" would not be the phrase that would come to mind. The man in charge, however, seemed much better in that regard. I believe he was the owner.
4. All those were relatively minor issues and I wouldn't write a review about just them. The only thing that really concerned me was the Chevy Suburban used to escort us to the lake. The fact that it was old and dirty didn't really bother me, and kind of seemed consistent with the rest of our experience. The 2 broken windows weren't that big of a deal either, nor the smell of either oil, fuel, or exhaust that seemed to hang around the back seat. The thing that had me a little tense was the lack of any working seatbelts, especially for my 2 young kids. It was about a 25-minute drive to the lake from the staging area, and about a 45-minute drive from the lake back to our resort (my mom had driven our van back to the resort from the staging area). Besides other vehicles to crash into, there appear to be hundreds of wild horses running around this reservation (which is great), but if just one of them had run across the road and hit our vehicle head on, someone (besides the horse) would likely have been kiilled. I imagine being on the reservation this operation is excluded from the usual safety and liability concerns that are standard practice with other vendors off the reservation. read more
