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 Last year, Janelle Criscione celebrated her 66th birthday on a white-water rafting trip along the Snake River in Idaho and Oregon. Along the way, she camped and hiked in rugged Hells Canyon, North America’s deepest river gorge. She also chopped vegetables and sampled wine. Ms. Criscione, a retired nurse who lives in St. Louis, is a big outdoor enthusiast; for her birthday the year before, she’d gone climbing in the Teton Mountains in Wyoming.
What she is not is a particularly experienced or ambitious cook. Friends of Ms. Criscione had gone on white-water trips with the organizers of this one, which was going to center around food. When they told her about it, she was interested. “Then I found out they might make us
cook,” she said with a laugh.
“I am not a cook, but I learned and watched a lot,” she said, adding thatwhen she returned home, she could “prepare almost anything,” rattling off an impressive array of dishes, including prime rib, Alaskan salmon and cakes buried in coals,
all made with little hardware beyond a covered cast-iron kettle. “I
mean, you can do this at home.”
The trip Ms. Criscione took was
the inaugural voyage of ROW Adventures’ Culinary Whitewater Series, in
which participants can raft Class III and IV rapids on the Snake or
Salmon Rivers in Idaho, or the Grande Ronde River in northeast Oregon.
But the distinguishing attraction is the opportunity to cook up fancy
fare the old-fashioned way, on the trail with not much more than a
Dutch oven.
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