Quiet Waters Paddling Adventures

When I moved to Albuquerque, one of my friends jokingly said «U know New Mexico is a beautiful place, it can be a great place to stay, if only u can ignore the people!» — I experienced this first hand after meeting the people at this place!
We went there today after planning a kayaking tour. We called them up beforehand and told them that we were novices. They don’t have 2 person kayaks so our only option was single person kayaks. About 1 minute after starting, one of my friends toppled and fell and after struggling for a few minutes, decided to quit. What would you expect any normal business owner to do? If not give a refund, AT LEAST BE COURTEOUS right??? Guess what we got from them — They WERE EXTREMELY RUDE TO US and also to our partners who completed the tour and they charged full price for the ones who quit. I felt like these guys would be the one who would be standing and laughing when a child or old man trips and falls to the ground! Bottom line — Bad attitudes cannot run good businesses, Stay away from them for your own sake!!! Just like another reviewer wrote about them, it is way better to just rent your own kayak from somewhere else and just use the river then pay them for nothing

friendly chatty owner and driver. reasonable prices. equipment was in good shape. like melanie l. said, they are very thorough with the safety talk and river orientation. yes, i did find it a little boring and at times irrelevant (white water rafting section of the video), but id MUCH rather they overdo the safety than underdo it. im sure they are required to do this by law or by their insurance carrier for liability purposes. at the end of the day, there were no surprises on the river, and thats whats important.
the rio grande itself is pretty boring. its very shallow (which the company is upfront about), to the tune of 12−18″ on average. if you somehow managed to flip over, which is nearly impossible in these calm waters, you could literally just stand up and flip it back over. the deepest water on the whole trip was around 3 feet. water is also very slow and requires quite a bit of effort to paddle through the whole way. the banks are lined with uninhabited ranchland and shrubbery. we were escorted most of the way by egrets and other birds, which was fun.
the river isnt great, but thats not the company’s fault. i recommend the 1 or 1.5 hour trip.

My girlfriend and I took a whole week to travel all over New Mexico. In our last couple of days we realized we had not experienced the Rio Grande and decided to rent some kayaks and check it out.
The folks at Quiet Waters rocked. They gave us a *brief* safety lesson and run-​down of the course and brought us to a beautiful spot on the Rio Grande to start our trip. All of the safety and course advice was much appreciated, as the Rio Grande bends and juts and does some unexpected stuff (though it is still beginner grade stuff, at least the course we floated). At the end of our float they were exactly where they said they would be, when they said they would be there, to pick us up. Add all of that together, and throw in the fascinating local history and ecology we learned from the staff and you have yourself a worthwhile activity just outside of Albuquerque, NM.
Oh, and the prices were super reasonable!

This review was so long, that I had to actually blog about it. See full post here:
**Long story short: Rent your own kayak and it’ll probably be the same experience as the one I had with this place.