Great Info. Thanks for sharing. We're on the adults only trip in August. Will you share some details about the different activities you did? Zip-lining, rafting, horseback riding... did you do them all? Was there anything (besides long underwear) that you wished you had brought?
Happy to!
Rafting - it was FREEZING. The water was 42 degrees the day we went! Since you're going in August, it may be a tad warmer, but I'm guessing not incredibly warmer. One piece of packing advice on what NOT to bring - don't bother bringing water shoes for rafting. Everyone ended up wearing the booties that are provided along with a wetsuit instead, and there wasn't any other activity where we needed or wanted water shoes. Again, I'm assuming it'll still be cold water in August! I would have liked to have a long-sleeve quick-dry shirt to wear under the wetsuit (I wore my bathing suit and a short-sleeve quick-dry shirt). I'm not sure long sleeves would have helped that much, but it might have! Despite the freezing temperatures, it was really fun, and my kids both said it was the highlight of the trip for them. When we went, the rapids were class 2 and 3. None of them were particularly crazy or scary. Our guide was telling us that the river changes a lot over the course of the summer, so the river may be wilder or calmer when you go. The guides were great, and the scenery was really pretty! You are put 6 to a boat, so we were paired with a mother/son two-some from our trip. Unlike our Costa Rica
ABD trip, where the guides took our pictures and also bought the picture package for everyone from the rafting place, there weren't any pictures taken. You could buy pictures from the rafting place but they were really expensive - I think it was $35 for one picture? Or you could get the whole set on CD or USB for around $175. Fortunately the mother/son on our raft bought the pictures and shared them with us!
Ziplining - this was one of the activities we could pick at Big Sky Resort. There were 3 options here - the nature zipline (a calmer zipline), the zipline adventure (more extreme ziplining), and the "Lone Peak Expedition," where you take a chair lift and then tram up to the top of the mountain by Big Sky Resort (called "Lone Peak"!) We did the zipline adventure. We've been lucky enough to zipline a lot of really cool places, so the zipline wasn't that exciting to us. People who hadn't really ziplined before loved it a lot more - and the scenery was really beautiful (but hard to compare to Costa Rica or Hawaii!) Lone Peak Expedition got rave reviews, and I kind of wish we had done that, just because it was a little different. Everyone said the view at the top was amazing, and some people even saw moose on the way up! For lunch at Big Sky Resort (which you do on your own), there is an amazing burger and craft beer place called Montana Jack. The burgers were FANTASTIC! It was also a great place to sit and have a beer after ziplining, while we waited until it was time to head out.
Horseback riding - this was at 320 Guest Ranch. You could choose from a 2-hour or half-day ride. We chose 2-hour because our kids have never ridden before, and DH and I haven't ridden much. That was definitely the right amount of time for us, as our bottoms and knees were tired at the end of 2 hours! Our group of 4 went with our own guide, which was really nice to be in a small group setting. The views were awesome, and our guide took pictures of us on our horses about halfway through the trip. If you really LOVE horseback riding, 320 Guest Ranch also offers an all-day ride - I'm guessing you could pay the difference if you really wanted to do that ride while you were there.
Hmmmm...what else would I have packed? I'm not sure on that. I can tell you what we did pack that we were glad we had . . . we wore shorts and t-shirts every day, and I had two jackets - a thin hoody jacket and a North Face fleece. I was glad I had both of those (although maybe you wouldn't need the fleece in August). We wore jeans at night and usually long-sleeve shirts. Near the end it got warmer, and we were able to wear shorts and long-sleeve shirts at night. We wore our hiking shoes pretty much every day, and I probably could have gotten away with those being my only shoes. If you don't have hiking shoes, you could get away with sturdy tennis shoes (although some people who wore tennis shoes remarked that they wished they'd brought their hiking shoes). I did wear a pair of flats to dinner one night, and swapped out my hiking shoes for sneakers the other nights. I brought flip-flops that I never wore. I brought 2 bathing suits and only needed one (rafting day was the only day we wore bathing suits). We got binoculars for the trip. We probably could have done without them, but we're going to Alaska next year, and I figured we'd definitely want them for that trip. I probably wouldn't buy binoculars just for this trip, but bring them if you have them. A backpack was super helpful for keeping all of our stuff for each day. Our guides always had sunscreen and bug spray for us. (It was definitely buggy - especially when we stopped for lunch the day we did the stagecoach ride!)
If I think of anything else, I'll come back and post it!