Experience and Safety
As one of the original rafting companies in California, Mother Lode has thirty years and well over 2 million river miles of experience in providing fun, safe river trips for 300,000 satisfied guests.
Not only has Mother Lode been out there more than all but a few, our company has always been at the leading edge of the whitewater industry. In the 1980s we became the first company to require all our guides to have Rescue 3 Swiftwater Technician I certification, raising the bar for safety training. Our safety record, several million river miles without a life threatening injury, remains the finest in the river industry.
Best Pricing and Value — Guaranteed
Mother Lode has always provided the best river trip available at a fair price. We are so confident that you cannot find a rafting trip of comparable value and features for a lesser price — we guarantee that if you find it, we will match their price. Just provide written documentation in the form of an invoice or advertisement, and if it is apples to apples, we are determined not to be undersold!
Furthermore, Mother Lode enjoys among the highest customer return rates in the whitewater industry (86%). We are confident that you can look forward to a truly memorable river experience that will exceed your expectations.
Luxurious Private Campground
In the 1970s Mother Lode became one of the first companies to commit to owning its own river camp. This facility has tripled in size over the years, is now over 12 acres and is the largest river camp owned by an outfitter on the South Fork American. There are large areas of beautiful dust-free grass, towering heritage oaks for shade, tent cabins, solar powered hot showers and flush toilets, two spacious commercial kitchens (one of which can be rented to prepare your own meals), charming river stone walkways and walls, a sand volleyball court, horseshoe rings, tons of lawn game sets, and an unequalled list of amenities for your comfort. The camp is available exclusively to our guests and can be viewed on our Camp Tour.
Mother Lode’s Challenge Ropes Course and Outdoor Education Program provide additional dimensions for your river experience available nowhere else on the South Fork American. Adding Ropes to Rafting markedly enhances the river trip experience for groups of adults and youth. Youth and school groups enjoy the Wilderness Tournament or an Outdoor Education Program combined with rafting.
If you need rafting or kayaking instruction, or perhaps Swiftwater Rescue training for a group or want to join a larger group as an individual, Mother Lode has a great program to fit you needs. Just give us a call.
In addition to the programs we offer, Mother Lode is the ideal location from which to launch your own Multisport Adventure. There is a virtually unlimited opportunity for groups, families and individuals to combine rafting with additional days of hiking, biking, wine tasting, music festivals, parasailing and the many other recreational opportunities our central location affords. To assist you in planning such a multisport adventure our website includes a local event calendar, a hiking and biking trail guide and a wine tasting tour guide. Feel free to ask for details. Our friendly reservations staff will assist you to find what you need.
Exceptional Guides and Staff
Our guides are friendly, fun to be around and enjoy sharing their legendary love of rivers with you. Respected on the river as outstanding whitewater boaters, MaLode guides are carefully chosen, extensively trained, mentored and challenged to meet exceptional performance standards at every level.
When California whitewater all began back in the 1960s, MaLode guides were there, helping to establish paddle-guiding as the dominant method of navigating California Rivers. Our crew, which has always included lots of women guides, helped open commercial guiding opportunities to women and were instrumental in creating an atmosphere at Mother Lode that is particularly family friendly and accessible to all.
In the year 2000, MaLode guides achieved another unique milestone. Each full-time guide is now also an instructor in our Outdoor Education Program and a facilitator for our Challenge Ropes Course. These experiences give them outstanding natural history interpretive skills and access to scores of games and other ways of making your river trip exceptionally fun and engaging.
Although it is not a requirement, we find that the majority of our guides have college degrees in a wide variety of subjects. Their broad diversity of interests and intellectual curiosity is only exceeded by their enthusiasm about sharing their knowledge with you.
Meticulous Organization, Tasty Meals and Quality Equipment
Much care is taken in the planning of all of our river trips and other programs to ensure that your experience is enjoyable. Our office staff and guides are always willing to discuss any questions you may have about shuttles, start and finish times, meals, etc.
Great food is also a longstanding MaLode tradition and it is easy to appreciate that each guide is an accomplished cook. From the aroma of fresh brewed coffee in the morning, to mouth-watering meals prepared from ingredients that are always fresh, beautifully presented and often include organically grown vegetables from our organic garden, eating well is guaranteed at Mother Lode.
We use only Coast Guard approved America’s Cup Personal Floatation Devices, which have the highest floatation rating available. On every river trip we bring an extensive safety kit in a plastic Pelican box, rather than a hard metal ammo box that could hurt you if you fell against it; this was another innovation started at Mother Lode that spread throughout the river industry. We use state-of-art self-bailing Hyside and Avon rafts made of Hypalon rubber, which is extremely abrasion resistant. Our Wing and SOTAR rafts are made of a PVC/polyester blend of material that is highly tear resistant. These materials are often coated with polyurethane, the material that makes up the soles of hiking boots, and the result is a raft that is amazingly strong and tough. At a cost of $3000 to $5000 each these rafts are worth every penny.
Commitment to Environmental Leadership
Each river experience we design employs our ECOS concept: the direct Experience of nature; which helps form a Connection to it; while improving our powers of Observation; and ultimately motivating us toward Stewardship of the environment upon which we all depend.
Ecotourism, which can be defined as enjoying the resource while acting to preserve it for future generations, is the purpose of our company. We are proud that over the past thirty plus years our participants have written 20,000+ hand-written letters and helped save 12 California Rivers to date. This is a record unequaled in the river industry and is rivaled only by Friends of the River, California’s foremost river conservation organization. We attribute this to our dedication to ECOS and the magical power of rivers.
Sustainable practices are also something we believe in at Mother Lode, which is why we’ve aimed to reduce our carbon footprint incrementally to eventually achieve an 80% reduction. Already we have implemented thermal and electric solar power throughout the property, a waste vegetable oil powered bus, truck, and station wagon, and the addition of an organic garden to supplement our meals are all strategies we’ve implemented to achieve this goal.
This year we are going even further by introducing our Sustainable Practices program, where guests can become educated and empowered in order to achieve environmental solutions. Another new feature is that we are providing our guests with the opportunity to purchase carbon offsets.
