Hot Summer Paddle
It was an especially nice morning. Cooler than most had been the previous eleven days in the Grand Canyon, perhaps under 95 degrees. Granite and sandstone mountains towered on each side, the current riddled with occasional eddy monsters, as we called them, pushed me along quickly - 11 miles in 1 1/2 hours. There were six boats ahead of me, about the same number behind. We were spread out over a mile and I could hear none talking as usual. There was a rhythmic thumping, the bumping of a paddle on a gunnel, as someone paddled along. The noise seemed an intrusion. Vulcan's Anvil appeared ahead and I drifted broadside toward it. The current's pillow kept me three feet from the rock and I couldn't reach it, so I applied my paddle and drifted around the right side kissing it as I passed, a second kiss for good measure. This is a tradition said to appease the River Gods. Lava Falls could not be far ahead. I could now begin to hear it's deep roar.
My understanding was that you can hear Lava Falls from several miles away and the walls closed in and turned black and ominous - but not so on either count. I rounded a bend and saw the lead boats pulling onto the right bank preparing to scout. We were at the top of the major rapid of the Colorado.
We were twelve days into this trip. We had started on 8 July 2002 (that is if you don't count the months of planing or the five days of driving as part of the trip), twenty-four of us plus five guides. The group had collected at Marble Canyon Lodge the day before setting out, some having flown, some having driven to Arizona. Boats had been inspected and last-minute fixings taken care of; various gear was repacked; last minute provisions (notably beer) obtained. That evening we met our river guides: two boatmen: Dave and Ryan - one for each raft, two swampers (want-a-be guides who are willing to do this for the fun of doing it and tips): Bob and Zack - one for each raft, and a kayaker: Andy - who would be our paddling river guide and chief rescue boater. Our gang consisted of Tom Todd, who had organized the trip, & Leslie Hollweg, Eric Bishop, Ron Brender, Joe & Nancy Damboise, Nancy Gero & Pat Taft, Bruce Healey, Brian Henderson, Laura Higgins & Don Skolfield, John Jenkins, Donna Jean Kaiser, Dick & Verniel Morin, Cindy Piro, Mike Smorgans, Jackie Schoendorff & Ted Kennelly, Sara Seager & Mike Wevrick, and Love Muffin, my wife, and myself.
The next morning, Monday, under a hot Arizona sun, we put in at Lee's Ferry, happy, in more than mild anticipation, perhaps somewhat apprehensive. The water filling the river from the depths of Lake Powell was 43 degrees, making dressing somewhat problematic - do you dress for baking in 105 degree desert weather or for taking a chilling swim? I chose to wear a short-sleeve hydroskin top with long sleeve paddle jacket and paddle pants, a costume I'd maintain throughout the trip. We'd see three notable rapids the first day: Badger, Soap Creek, and House Rock. At these we learned the power of big water, most of us underestimating the speed and strength of the current and failing to paddle hard enough, fast enough, or soon enough in at least one of these rapids. My swim at House Rock was long and cold but one doesn't stay chilled long in the 100+ weather. At camp, a short way beyond House Rock, a fine pork chop dinner refueled us after 18 miles of paddling.
That first night a hot wind blew. We slept on cots, nearly naked in bathing suits. The wind blew hot sand onto us, making the night the least pleasant we'd encounter. I wasn't the only one thinking to myself, "My God, sixteen more days of this! What have I gotten myself into?" In the morning some of us discovered gear had blown away in the wind. Fortunately, nothing of great significance was lost. Love Muffin lost a nice straw hat, I was grateful that my paddle jacket which I had carelessly left in the canoe was still there.
We had intended to get an early start the second day, but it didn't happen. We were getting used to our new routines: packing up, getting coffee and breakfast, lining up for the "groover" , and loading the rafts. Loading and unloading rafts was a major chore involving all hands forming a human chain through which we'd pass the gear from beach to raft or raft to beach. The river level had dropped considerably during the night requiring us to spent a great deal of effort pushing the two big 35 foot rafts back into the water.
The groover - our toilet (so named due to the fact that the original implementation of this device was an ammo can lined with a plastic bag which left grooves on the user's rear), was an experience we weren't so sure we'd appreciate. But at Potty Training 101, a quick course given the first day by Ryan, we all learned how the do was done, and for the most part things remained very sanitary. I was impressed by the cleanliness of the campsites. The Colorado gets lots of usage, some 29,000 people a year, but the campsites look pretty much unused! It is a credit, I believe, to the commercial outfitters; they insist on cleaning up even small crumbs dropped on the sand. A hand washing station for the breakfast, lunch, and dinner table is always first set up, another for the groover. The guides, like mothers, insistently harangued us about washing hands. I admit I am not usually so particular on a camping trip without their supervision. We had been concerned about reports of a number or river users being stricken by some disease earlier in the season, cause undetermined. But our gang stayed healthy.
With a late start behind us, day 2 put us into the "Roaring Twenties": rapids with numbers rather than names - 21, 23, 23 1/2, 24, 24 1/2, 25 - indicating the river mile where each occurs. Number 25 knocked me over. They quickly start to get muddled together, most pretty similar to the last. The six major drops were scouted, which took considerable time, but even the smaller rapids we ran without scouting would be considered big water back home. My perspective was changing. Our skills were improving quickly. Some opted to join Love Muffin on the raft. The gals took turns riding the shredder.
After running the bigger drops, we had lunch, ran several more without scouting, then loaded all canoes and boaters onto the rafts and motored down to see some sights. My shoulder was sore, so the rest was welcome. We hiked to some Anasazi Indian ruins then stopped at Red Wall Cavern which is a huge amphitheater excavated by the river. While at the Red Wall Cavern, we saw an avalanche occur a mile or two downstream. Immense clouds of dust followed it down the mountain. It started on the top and stopped about halfway down, didn't make it to the river.
The wind picked up and thunderclouds formed. Then the water pump in the engine of one raft died. The engine was swapped out with a spare. The camp we were planning on was taken by another group and we had to go until about 7:00. We were tired and ready to crash; but the guides did their thing and prepared another fine dinner.
The morning of the third day we started by 8:30; we were getting accustom to the system. We had loaded all gear, canoes, and paddlers on the rafts and floated, just drifting. Dave pointed out test borings at a proposed dam site. They talked about the Glen Canyon Dam, read some poetry, talked of the history - a pleasant ride. In this manner, we drifted our way down to mile 53 where we would take a hike to the Anasazi Granaries.
Hiking some 500 feet up steep trails in 105 degree temperature made me appreciate an image of Hell. I wondered if park rangers were sent here to do trail maintenance as punishment for certain severe offenses of protocol. Some poor souls had built steps and lined the edge of the trail with rocks. I couldn't imagine working here, just climbing the hill was work enough. Love Muffin gave up at the half-way point and went back down to find some shade. At the top it was a cooler 97°F. The Anasazi Indians had built stone walls against the cliffs here forming several small rooms each about six feet square where these ancient people would store grain they harvested. That people would inhabit such an area struck me as a sad indication of very intense fear of conflict or something terrible in the lands above to drive them here. Or perhaps it was just easier to find shade and water here than in the desert above.
We ate lunch after hiking back down, then paddled some six miles to our third campsite at mile 56 just below Kwagnut Rapids. Kwagnut was a fun rapid - there is an eddy that takes you half way back upstream where one can ferry back out into the big waves, an act I repeated about five times until I tore a nasty cut in the wet mushy skin of my finger against my gunnel.
We arrived at camp with plenty of time to relax this day. The guides fished and caught a mess of trout. Shortly before dinner a great wind blew and the shredder went tumbling end over end down the beach, three or four people chasing madly after it. Bob tackled it as it hit the water. The night was cool and comfortable.
And so went our trip - hot, fun filled, tiring days; intimidating big-water rapids: Unkar, Nevills, Hance, Sockdolager, Grapevine, Zoroaster, Horn Creek, Granite, Hermit, Crystal, the Tunas, the Gems, Waltenberg, Specter, Deubendorff, Kanab, Upset, and more numerous smaller rapids. We took interesting hikes up side canyons: the Little Colorado, where, due to low flows of the drought, its warm blue waters denied the Colorado of its characteristic mud content; at Bright Angel Canyon to Phantom Ranch, we stopped to replenish water, buy lemonade and mail letters; at Deer Creek; and Matkatamiba, we sat side- by-side in the creek forming "butt dams" enabling us to send small gushers of water down the waterway; and Havasu Creek, we spent six or seven hours hiking up that pretty canyon to a waterfall and pool where we dove and jumped off the cliffs. Basically, this is as much fun (or maybe more so) than being twelve years old. As we paddled down the river, we could make out faces in the cliffs- people, trolls, and gargoyles. Tom pointed out a formation that looked like a chicken pulling a train. Dinners and breakfasts were always great, as were the lunches. The procedure the guides followed for lunch and dinner was to set up a "distraction table" where snacks and hors devours could be quickly put out and we would cluster, staying out of the way while they prepared meals.
The big water of the Colorado took some getting used to. It's not readily comparable to the rapids we encounter here. They're not even rated on a scale we are used to, the Colorado has its own rating system: 1-10. Though the waves are huge, the waves alone are not as hard to negotiate as one might think - primarily because the wave trains are, for the most part, quite regular. The rebound waves coming off the canyon walls present a greater hazard; they are not so regular, and as you line up to go over a wave of the wave train, a rebound wave can sneak up and hit you sideways. Of course when any of these waves are breaking the problem becomes more difficult. And sometimes, rather than break, they'd explode! Then there's the holes, holes like we don't see here in the east. Naturally much of the river is flowing into the biggest holes, which makes them the biggest holes, and makes them hard to escape. As mentioned earlier, one must paddle harder, faster, and sooner to avoid letting the current have its way with you. Then there's the flatwater - the eddy monsters. Most of the flatwater is not - it is riddled with boils, and whirlpools, and layers of water folding over each other. These squirrelly currents are similar to what we see along an eddy line, but multiplied by a factor of a hundred or a thousand. The boils might stop you or send you off course and certainly keep you on edge. The whirlpools would also send you off course and maybe spin you around a couple times if you let them. (Occasionally a fun thing to do. ) The water folding phenomena was not as prevalent but much more nerve-racking. Imagine surface water flowing north, surface water flowing south, the two currents colliding and flowing straight down. Being caught in this collision is to be caught in a side surf and I would generally just surf it out until it dissipated. The collision line might move me 30 yards across the river before it did though. I suppose all this activity was also happening in the rapids too, but there one is concentrating on the primary features: waves, rebounds, holes, etc. Now reading back over this, I think I made it sound pretty bad, worse than it actually is; because it's not all that difficult, just different. It took some practice, took some swimming. You learn that forward momentum is your friend.
Some may have had a more mature attitude than mine, they'd portage, line, or put their boats on the rafts for some of the bigger drops. I felt compelled to run them - as many as I could. Of course, in our minds, at least in mine, I kept wondering how I'd feel, and what I'd do, when I saw Lava.
On the eleventh night, Andy gave a pep talk encouraging people to attempt a run on Lava. On the twelfth day, as we stood on the rocks above Lava scouting it, his tone was much different, "Oh man, oh man! I've never seen it this bad. If there's a little more water there's a route on the left, if there's a little less water there's a route on the right. I don't see how any open boats can get through today." This was very discouraging, but four open boats ran it anyway.
After Lava, I experienced a major let-down. The climax was over, I wanted the trip to be over, what was the sense of the remaining four more days? But this letdown was short lived, the pace and the fun picked up again within a couple hours. There were yet more rapids to run, hikes to take, dinners to eat, beers to drink, and stories to tell. And it was all a wonderful, excepting perhaps for the last day when the pace slowed down to just pleasant.
It could have been more of a party atmosphere that last full day. The two rafts had been tied together and all boats and boaters were loaded aboard. But we were all fairly quiet and somber as we ran down Lake Meade. We started seeing tour boats zooming upstream, helicopters flying overhead. Later we ran into some unplanned excitement when we ran aground on a sandbar in the low waters of Lake Meade (60 feet lower than normal.) We spent over an hour, trying to find a course, then all people getting off the rafts in the knee-deep water. With us off, the rafts floated again and we managed to push them to deeper water. From there we motored on down to our last campsite on the shores of Lake Meade. There were other parties camped here and a porta-john - the groover was better. The final day, day 16, was a short one. It was a mere 45 minute ride to our take-out at South Cove to gather our stuff into our cars, shake hands and head for home.
The runs on Lava? Well, some attempted it and there were a variety of experiences. Andy, our guide, who had run the river some 75 times previously, made a successful run, clean as can be considering the inelegance of punching several huge waves. Pat's run was very eventful and quite spectacular, he flipped up near the top and managed to roll back up - coming upright and in a surf on the biggest wave at the bottom. Very impressive, a great crowd-pleaser. I don't remember seeing Joe's run.
Four open boaters ran it. Eric made a successful run sneaking along the shoreline on the left, out of the big water and boofing a few rocks, by no means simple and relatively dangerous in that a mishap could result in a wrapped boat.
Don took Donna-Jean's boat down. He was out towards the middle in some really big stuff. He was knocked over in a big wave near the top and couldn't make a roll in that big water in spite of some heroic efforts.
Mike Weverick made a rather spectacular run. He had chosen the same route I was contemplating - about 30 yards off the left bank. About a third of the way down, where there was a small slot between two holes, he got messed up and was sucked into the right hole sideways. The river tried to eat him up. But he braced and fought back. With great strength he pulled himself out of the hole and made it to the cleanest part of the river where he successfully made his way to the bottom, pleasing the cheering onlookers.
I was encouraged that he had chosen essentially the same route I had picked out, but discouraged that he got bolixed up in the place I figured would be the most difficult. I entered down a slot that led me into a small hole to punch, then I caught an eddy. This was planned in case I had to bail from that first hole, but there was no need. I saw the bubbles and the guide rock leading me to the tricky slot and peeled out onto them. I hit the slot well and paddled down it afraid that not enough speed would allow me to be sucked into Mike's side surf hole. All went as I had planned it to this point, then somewhere I lost my focus, I lost my bearings, I lost it. Funny how disoriented one can become, and how quickly - I thought I was sucked sideways into a hole and flipped. The video, though, shows me entering a hole in good position to punch it, but just submerging, boat, body, then helmet down into the white froth. I was so disoriented I thought I was upside down when, in fact, I was upright until I bailed out. But I'm glad I tried it!