How safe is Bend Whitewater Park passageway for families?

When Bend resident Angie Neumaier and her five children went to float the Deschutes River in Bend on a sweltering Sunday, they expected to relax.

“We would never have done it with our young kids,” had they known what was waiting for them, Neumaier said Monday. “It was much, much more intense than what we thought.”

The Bend family is among many who contacted NewsChannel 21 to say the “safe passage” channel at the whitewater park is anything but relaxing — or safe, especially for families with young children who expect a slow-flowing lazy trip downriver to beat the heat.

“I was in a double tube with my 3-year-old, holding onto another tube with my 8-year-old, and we kept going down the different rapids,” Neumaier recalled. “At one point, my husband lost the grip of my 10-year old in her kayak, and she just flipped.”

None of Neumaier’s children were seriously injured, but she said her daughter, Grace was shaken.

“I felt scared that something bad was going to happen on the other ones,” Grace recalled.

Don Horton, the executive director of the Bend Parks and Recreation District, said floaters who decide to ride the rapids should “know before they go.”

“Really know the river before you ever get in the water, Horton said. “We have posted signs at all the put-ins that really speak to how to travel down the river safely. And so we really encourage people to stop, take a look at those signs, spend a few minutes reading them, and to understand what their own abilities are.”

Horton also stressed the “passage channel” includes Class 1 and 2 rapids, which mean equipment appropriate for floating is necessary.

“This experience is not for blow-up toys,” he said. “It’s not for these blow-up mattresses and the blow-up animals and the type of things that you would use in a swimming pool.

“This is still a wild river, and still a whitewater experience,” Horton added.

Even though Neumeier and her family are rocked by their experience, she said it won’t stop them from floating again.

“We love it,” she said. “we will continue floating the river but we definitely would not send them down there in their tubes.”

You can find more information at: http://www.bendparksandrec.org/bend-whitewater-park/