As any student or staff member at Salida High School knows, math teacher and tennis coach Josh Bechtel is quite the adventurer. The main reason for his travels was his love for kayaking, and he was often paid by companies to do first descents of waterfalls and rivers all around the world. These trips didn’t always run smoothly, however, and the most memorable moments were mostly ones of traumatic incidents.
On one trip, sponsored by the Mexican Tourism Board, his team and he were doing a first descent down a river along the Mexican-Guatemala border. They needed to follow the river for 30+ miles. Eventually, about four to five miles upstream, they found a village and were immediately caught off-guard. People from the village surrounded them, machetes in hand, and held them hostage for a few hours. Luckily, they had a friend with them who was fluent in Spanish, and they managed to negotiate a ransom price of about $100 per person. Since it was a sponsored trip, they managed to convince the mob that the board would find and protect them. Once they agreed to let them go, the group had to trek 13 miles with their boats to the nearest road while worrying about the possibility of being followed. Luckily, they made it to safety, and the village didn’t take their valuable filming equipment.
He explained, and showed, a film he did in his twenties when he was paddling a waterfall descent on a Mexican show for Telavisa. He had the most fun on this trip, and it was his earliest experience being on TV. His preferred sports tend to be intense and dangerous, so there are many stories of horrifying happenings.
After he met his now wife, Avery, he left for South America and Africa, but he kept in contact with her and met up a few times. Avery was finishing her last year of college at Adams State, and Bechtel agreed to stay here until then. That was sixteen years ago.
While SHS is happy that Bechtel got to experience so much exciting travel, everyone is so glad that Bechtel’s crazy life journey led him to teach us his wisdom at Salida High School. His class certainly wouldn’t be as interesting without it.
