Grand Canyon Adventure

Al Agnew · October 31, 2015

16 days. 226 miles. 73 named rapids. Incomparable scenery. Floating through the Grand Canyon has been on my bucket list for many years. Mary was sure she was going to be flipped out of the raft, sucked underneath a rock, and drowned, but she finally agreed to do it. Last year we tried to book a trip with OARS, which research had shown had a great reputation. No way we could do it on our own; the Park Service requires any private group floating the Canyon have at least one member who had already been down it, and the reputation of the rapids was such that I was unlikely to be an experienced enough rower to handle it.

We found out OARS is so popular that you have to book Canyon trips at least a year in advance. In fact, in April of last year, already the only trips still available were from September 30th to October 15th, and another trip in the latter part of October, the last trip of the year. We had debated whether to do a shorter trip; you can do 7 days from Lee's Ferry to Phantom Ranch, with a hike from the river up to the top of the rim at the end, or Phantom Ranch to Diamond Creek, with a hike down into Phantom Ranch at the beginning. But I wanted to do as much of the Canyon as possible. The trip from Lee's Ferry to Diamond Creek was the one available. There is another 65 miles of the canyon below Diamond Creek, but the stretch we would be on included most of the big rapids and most spectacular landscape.

The highly professional but friendly people at OARS sent us a checklist of what we would need to bring. They furnished all food and drinks, tents, and cooking, along with dry bags. You could rent sleeping gear from them, but Mary and I decided to bring our own. Other than that, we had to bring both warm and cool, quick dry clothing, water shoes, hiking boots, and personal items. Because the trip was late in the season, the weather could turn cold, so we were required to bring more warm, waterproof stuff than would be necessary on mid-season trips. And it all had to fit in two large dry bags apiece, plus a smaller bag for the personal stuff that we would need during the day; the big bags would be tied down and not accessible until camp in the evening.

We spent quite a bit of time lining up what we would take, and of course spent some money on stuff that we thought needed upgrading. And then there were the camera decisions. I didn't want to chance bringing my DSLRs and big lenses, given that we were going to be wet a good part of the time. So I opted for bringing two waterproof point and shoot cameras, a GoPro video cam, and my cell phone in its waterproof case, which takes photos as good as the point and shoots. Which brought us to the problem of batteries for 16 days. I ended up with five batteries for my primary point and shoot, two for the secondary point and shoot, three for the GoPro, and two portable chargers that would recharge the GoPro and my cell phone.

We left our place in Montana with three days to cover the 900 miles to Flagstaff, Arizona, where we would spend the final night and meet our guides. After spending part of a day in Zion National Park and around Glen Canyon Dam, we arrived in mid-afternoon of the day before the trip would start, and checked into the hotel where the pre-trip meeting would take place that evening.

When we went down to the small conference room, we were met by an attractive young woman who introduced herself as Ashley Brown, the trip leader, and a grizzled 60ish outdoor type who said he was "Rondo Jo, the last of the rodeo boatmen". The other clients were filtering in, and we were a bit surprised to see that there were more women than men (10 women, 6 men, including Mary and me), and that nearly all of them were around our age or older. Two women had come by themselves. There were only two young people, a brother and sister who were in their 20s. This made Mary feel a bit better; if these people could handle it, surely she could.

We were issued our dry bags, and we spent a good two hours that evening after the meeting packing them. Fortunately, our sleeping gear fit in one bag, so we had three other big ones for our clothing and other stuff, along with the two smaller bags. The next morning at 6 AM, we brought the bags down to the lobby to add them to the pile already there, parked the car where it would stay at the back of the lot, locked up our other luggage, and ate a quick breakfast in the hotel restaurant. By the time we finished, the dry bags were already loaded into two big vans, and at 7 AM we climbed aboard the vans for the two hour drive to Lee's Ferry.

You first cross the river on the high, Navajo Bridge over the canyon, and then wind your way down to Lee's Ferry itself, named after John D. Lee, who operated a real ferry here in the 1870s, and later was executed for his part in the Mountain Meadows Massacre. The river at the access was flowing very clear, and looked quite inviting, not to mention fishy. The clarity was because it comes out of Lake Powell just a few miles upstream, and that also makes it cold enough for trout for many miles downstream. I'd decided not to bring fishing tackle on this trip, perhaps the first time I've ever been on a river without it. Fortunately, one of the boatmen had an old pack rod and reel and a few trout lures, and I was able to fish at camp the second evening and catch a few just to say I did it.

The rafts and the other boatmen were waiting at the access. There was Lars, a strapping young man with wispy beard and earrings who had just been named "boatman of the year" by an outdoor magazine. He normally rows trips in Cataract Canyon upstream, which he said has bigger and more dangerous rapids than the Grand. Sean was a slightly built, bearded guy who plays guitar and repairs fiberglass dories when he isn't rowing. They would be the other boatmen besides Ashley and Rondo who would row us clients. Then there were two commissary rafts, one rowed by Jeff, another well-built young man, with his girlfriend along as helper. The other would be rowed by Alex, a very slender girl who didn't look to be much over 16. This was to be her first trip down the Grand Canyon, though she had guided in another canyon for more than a year. She was accompanied by Gretchen, who was along as another helper.

Mary and I climbed into Lars's raft for the first day, and we were on the river.

Though Lee's Ferry is generally considered the beginning of the Grand Canyon, it's actually the beginning of Marble Canyon. Here the river cuts a gash into an otherwise gently rolling plateau, with nearly sheer walls from 600 to 800 feet high, far different from the much deeper and more complex main part of the Canyon. As you travel downstream, the walls rise, tributary canyons become more numerous and more rugged, and the river carves its way ever deeper into older and older rock formations. The Moenkopi and Kaibab formations that are found at river level here at the beginning of the trip will make up the rim of the canyon, nearly a vertical mile above the river.

We passed the mouth of the Paria River soon after putting in. The Paria was barely flowing, as is usual most times of the year. But it has a huge watershed, and it is the first tributary to furnish sand and sediment to the Colorado below Glen Canyon Dam. After passing it, we began to notice boils of suspended sand swirling in the otherwise clear water, decreasing visibility to about 4 feet of green water instead of the extreme clarity we had seen starting out. In dry weather, this water clarity continues through the whole canyon these days.

We passed under the two Navajo Bridges (a new one had to be built a few decades ago). We looked for the condors that often hang out in the bridge structure, but saw none. And a little while later, we came to our first big rapid. Badger Rapid is named after the creek that comes into the river there, and like all Canyon rapids, it is the creek that actually forms the whitewater. These desert creeks periodically suffer incredible flash floods; one had happened this past summer that had caused tremendous property damage and loss of life to the south. And a flood in one of the canyon creeks moves a tremendous amount of rocks and debris, some of the boulders the size of a small automobile, into the river at the mouth of the creek. The debris forms a fan that chokes and constricts the river channel on that side, and the river is forced to flow over and around the debris, forming the rapid. And the rapids are often changing, and generally getting more constricted and difficult as time goes on. Before Glen Canyon Dam, the river would flood each year, often flowing more than 100,000 cubic feet per second at the height of a flood, enough power to clear out the channel at these creek mouths. But since the dam has regulated and lessened the flows, the river no longer has the power to keep its channel as open.

Ashley, in the lead, dropped over the lip of the rapid, her raft nearly disappearing for a second before coming up onto the first standing wave. And then we were in it. We'd anticipated this with trepidation ever since we'd planned the trip, but once in it, exhilaration took over. The 18 foot raft dropped into the trough, up the first wave, and then over the other waves with no problem whatsoever. The waves still looked huge, but Lars said as we finished and watched the other rafts come through that there was no rapid in the Canyon that was more than class 4 on the international scale. For some reason, Grand Canyon rapids have their own scale of difficulty from 1 to 10 instead of the 1 to 5 (or 6) of the international scale for rating rapids. Badger was 4-6, which would probably correspond to class 3. However, this was the biggest river I'd ever been on, and the wave trains and holes were proportionately big. The Colorado was flowing anywhere from 7000 to 13,000 cfs, depending upon dam releases, during our trip.

Still, I realized that this rapid had been straightforward, requiring no real maneuvering, just take it in the middle and ride the waves.

The next rapid came 3 miles downstream, Soap Creek. Here the creek comes in on river right, forcing the current to the left against a cliff, with boulders a hazard if you let yourself get too far left. These boulders, completely submerged, form huge hydraulic holes that could trap a raft, even one as big as ours, and flip it. And the current is pushing you leftward. In the Ozarks, in a canoe, I'd have my canoe pointed toward such a hazard and be backpaddling, back-ferrying to avoid them. In a raft, I would have done much the same thing. But the boatmen prefer pointing the bow of the raft toward where they want to go and pushing with the oars rather than pulling, unless the maneuver requires extreme strength and leverage. Lars pushed us to the right, avoiding the holes, and though it was a wet rapid that soaked Mary and me in the front and even got Lars wet, we came through as easily as we had Badger.

By the way, as I said, Mary and I were in the front on this day, sitting on a bench that doubled as storage space, with one of the rental sleeping pads atop it. In heavy rapids we would hold onto a strap holding the pad down with one hand, and another strap in front of us just inside the tubes of the raft with our other hand, to keep from being thrown from the rapid. There were only a few rapids the whole trip where I felt like it would have been possible to be thrown out had we not been holding on. The other two passengers in each raft were in the back, sitting on the tubes or leaning against the tied down pile of dry bags, holding onto the straps holding the bags down. The front was wetter than the back, but more comfortable overall.

We ran one more rapid, Sheer Wall, an easy one, and then pulled into camp. Campsites on the Colorado are not all that common, and getting less common as the years go by. The lack of flooding of the river due to the dam keeps the sandbars from being washed off and replenished as they once were, and most have grown up in vegetation. The camps all have names, and it's first come, first served. Two or three commercial trips and two or three private trips are allowed to put in each day, and so you may have as many as five other groups in the same general stretch of river. Often, another group will already be on the camp you wanted, and you have to know how far it is to the next one. All are named, and we stopped at one called Hot Na Na, from the wash that comes in there. It was a high sandbar studded with boulders and covered in vegetation, with numerous small clearings for the tents and one larger clearing for the cooking and dining area.

We set up our tent in a nice, level spot, and immediately became aware of what would be our biggest annoyance on the trip...SAND. The Colorado is a river of sand as much as water and rock, fine, powdery sand that gets into everything. One of the items on our checklist had been a whisk broom, and the little one we had, complete with tiny dustpan, was one of our most important pieces of gear.

One of the boatmen blew on a conch shell, signalling appetizers were ready. They were on a small table, and we all gathered around, grabbing a beer or cup of wine as well (we furnished our own alcoholic beverages, kept cool by laying in the bottom of the self-bailing rafts in the river water, and the rule was no drinking until reaching camp in the evening.) Then another conch shell was blown to call us to supper. The boatmen took turns cooking, and the meals were excellent each night, ranging from baked salmon to steaks to pork chops to stews to spaghetti and lasagna, with fresh greens for salads always available as well as side dishes.

Tired from a long day of arising early, riding in the van, and then nearly 17 miles of river, we all turned in soon after supper, probably no later than 8 PM, though we were already measuring time more by where the sun was than by watches and cell phones. It had been a hot, dry day, and the evening was so warm there was no point in putting the rain fly on the tent, nor getting into the sleeping bag. The tent had a mesh ceiling without the fly, and we gazed up at the stars for a while before dropping off to sleep.

To be continued...

Here are a few photos from that first day:

Typical Marble Canyon scene: DSCN4053.jpg.064e11f4569bceaa09681708b74