Uriah was fully alive

 

Uriah Shaffer wanted his ashes spread on the Crystal River, according to his friend David Ockers, who was with the 39-year-old Carbondale man when the river claimed his life this spring.

“He went out doing what he loved in a place he loved,” Ockers said in an interview Friday.

Shaffer had introduced Ockers to kayaking in 2002, years into a friendship that started at Colorado State University, where both majored in construction management. He loved to kayak and ski, and played guitar despite having lost pieces of several fingers in a childhood accident.

He grew up in Delta County, went to middle school at Orchard Mesa in Grand Junction and graduated from Fruita High school in the class of 1993. After college, he returned to the Western Slope and was working on being closer to his family and had many friends in the Grand Junction area, but had been staying with Ockers in the Roaring Fork Valley off and on for several years.

Ockers described him as a dancing fool, poetic songwriter, great joke teller, Broncos fan and ...more