Yesterday was a short day from our camp at Galloway on river right at mile 132 to OC’s, a camp on river left at mile
137. The new camp, a broad sandbar at the foot of dramatically swirled cliffs of Tapeats Sandstone, will be home for
two nights: today is our only scheduled layover day on the trip.

There’s some debate about what to do with our time. There’s some talk about hanging out at camp, doing laundry,
organizing gear, all that sort of stuff. But all that sort of stuff is exactly what I came on this trip to get
away from. Instead, I decide to hike the loop.

The loop is a trail that runs up the Deer Creek drainage just above mile 137, cuts over a steep ridge above the
spring at the head of the creek, and runs across a hot dry valley until it hits Thunder River, a huge waterfall
that pours directly from the limestone walls to feed Tapeats Creek. The loop trail then runs down beneath the
Thunder River falls into the Tapeats Creek drainage, and follows it down the Colorado River at mile 134.5 or so.
The final leg follows the Colorado River, first close along shore, then climbing steeply up over the cliffs that
form the narrowest point in the Grand Canyon at mile 135.5. Here steep walls of schist close in on the Colorado,
forcing it through a channel less than eighty feet wide–four boat lengths.

I’ll have company on my hike. Richard Carrier, our French raft guide from Chile, will com along–I still haven’t
figured out how a Frenchman from Chile got connected with our trip, but Dave Mortenson is an instigator of the
first rank so I’m not really surprised. And Cece Mortenson, Dave’s daughter, will be coming, too, bringing
ten-year-old Natalie.

Cece only hiked in yesterday to join us, covering twelve miles down from the rim, dropping five thousand feet or
so. Sounds like a lot of hiking, but Cece just passed her certification exams to become a Canadian climbing guide,
so it was probably a casual stroll for her. She’ll be with us for the rest of the trip before an upcoming trip to
France and then Afghanistan. Cece, apparently, is the kind of daughter whose parents have a hard time keeping
track of. She spent three seasons in Antarctica running a cold-weather survival program, and has climbed in South
America, North America, and who knows where else. She’s convinced Natalie will be able to handle the loop hike.

Deer Creek Narrows

Richard, Cece, Natalie and I are ferried across the river from camp to the start of our hike, Deer Creek Canyon,
where a dramatic waterfall pours down from the cliffs. A short steep stretch of trail leads from the beach at the
mouth of Deer Creek to the amazing Deer Creek Narrows. Here the creek has carved a swirling channel through the
Tapeats Sandstone, a narrow groove a hundred feet deep that runs along the trail–you could jump across it in a few
places if you were foolish enough to try. The trail runs across bedrock ledges at the top of this groove, but in
places it’s so narrow that your heels are hanging over the edge as you creep along the ledges.

It’s a magical place, Deer Creek Canyon. Above the deep slot of the Narrows the canyon opens to an idyllic grove of
cottonwoods and huge boulders. It’s easy to see why this is one of the most popular side trips in the Canyon. But
we pass through without stopping and soon we’re crossing to Deer Creek’s eastern side and beginning our climb up
to Deer Spring. It, too, is an amazing place: a huge waterfall that pours directly from the limestone wall.
At the base is a jungle of huge cottonwoods with gnarled roots stretched across the steep slopes, providing
convenient hand holds to climb up to the falls. The cool mist of the falling water feels good on a hot day.

I scramble to the very base of the falls to fill my water bottle, and the force of the falling water instantly tears
the bottle from my hand and smacks it down into the pool. After a few minutes the bottle resurfaces and I try
again–successfully this time. It’s always surprising, the force of that much water falling so far, moving so fast.
Makes me glad to have a life-jacket in the big rapids.

Surprise Valley

Our hike continues above Deer Spring with a gently rising climb into the hot dry Surprise Valley. Here we discover
the strategies for hiking with a ten-year-old: chocolate-covered almonds and round after round of “I Spy.”I spy,
with my little eye, something that begins with R: Redwall. Rocks. Red T-shirt. S: sand. Sky. Sun. M: mesquite.
B: butte. It’s a good way to catalogue what we’re seeing. There’s also a dried-out shell of a hummingbird impaled
on the leaf of a sword yucca–the work of a shrike, maybe–and a few agave mounds. And the agave themselves, tall
tender shoots that look a bit like giant asparagus. A few of them are missing bite-sized chunks where sheep have
been tasting them, so I give them a try. Not bad; moist and succulent and a bit like kolrabi. I hope they’re not
poisonous. I don’t see any dead sheep around, anyway.

Thunder River

And then–maybe five hot miles without a word of complain from Natalie–we’re at Thunder River. Here an even
bigger waterfall pours from the limestone walls above Tapeats Creek. We stop again to feel the cold spray and to
fill our water bottles and then it’s down the hot dusty trail to the Tapeats Creek drainage. From here we follow
the creek downstream to the Colorado. It’s a long hike, with lots of climbing and descending to avoid steep cliffs.
By the time we’re nearing the Colorado again, we’re scheming about hitching a ride with some rafters beached at
the mouth of Tapeats Creek instead of completing the loop.

When we get to the beach, the rafters are there. Cece and Natalie cross over to begin negotiations with several
older gentlemen who are, for some reason, sans pants. No luck, though. They won’t be going downstream far enough
to get us to camp. And so we set off again on the last leg of our hike. Some of the steam has gone out of us by
now, Still no complaints from Natalie–she is amazingly strong and cheerful–but even she is dragging a bit.

It’s another few miles of mostly flat hiking along the river, but then we reach the schist narrows where we’re
forced to climb up above a steep ridge. Finally, at the last steep climb, I grab some chocolate almonds and trail
mix.

“I’ll bound up this trail like a gazelle,” I tell Natalie. And I do–a very tired gazelle–dropping snacks at
convenient rocks along the way. It’s enough to re-energize Natalie, who chases up the trail after me gobbling
snacks. And then we’re at the top of the climb, just as I run out of trail mix. From there it’s a downhill
trail back to Deer Creek Narrows, and the steep descent back to the beach where Tom Martin is waiting with a
boat to ferry us back to camp.

We stagger into camp just in time for chicken, rice, and cheesecake that the cook crew has set aside for us.
Then, after a few hilarious round of rock, paper, scissors–there’s a major debate over whether you throw down
ON three, or one, two, three, and THEN throw down–several of us come away with brand-new Patagonia jackets
that Greg Hatten convinced the company to donate to our trip. I win my round and come away with a green rain
jacket.

Then it’s off to bed. We’ll be doing twenty river miles tomorrow, our biggest day yet.

Day 16

A short blog–maybe the last–on the final twenty minutes of laptop battery remaining.

First, the river taketh away: this was the morning Leif Mortenson woke to discover a crucial part of his generator unit
had been washed away in the night. He and I climbed into the knee-deep rushing water (in drysuits) to wrangle the
remaining components out of the water, but no luck finding the entire system. What there is left–the blue motor unit, the twelve-foot steel support bar, a few cables–all this has been driven deep under some boulders. Leif and I wear PFDs
and expect to get pulled off our feet and swept downstream at any moment, but we drag the whole works out without incident.

However, there will be very little chance to recharge anything until after Diamond Creek at Day 21, where our next
replacements may–MAY–be bringing in a back-up battery for the final few days.

An Easy Day

Our day starts at Last Chance Camp at river mile 156 or so. We’re hoping to be the first boats down to Havasu Canyon,
river mile 157, where we’ll spend the day. The plan is to take the 1950s replica boats–the Susie R, the Flavell, and
the Gem–and pull them up Havasu Creek as far as we can to duplicate historic photos from earlier Moulty Fulmer and Pat
Reilly trips. Those three boats leave early so they can get into the narrow creek before the other boats block it.

An early start, too, for the rest of us, and we’re out of camp before 9:00 a.m. to run the mile down to Havasu Canyon.
This is a tough pull-in on river left–miss it and you’ll be swept downstream into some shallow boulders where it might
take a Chinook helicopter to free a loaded raft. But we all make it in (ten boats), followed by a group of Southerners
in five yellow rafts, and then two white rafts and a bevy of kayaks from a British/French groups–and one of their
French river runners is a woman who met our own Frenchman, Richard, in Chile a few years ago. A huge canyon, a small
world.

Havasu Creek is an amazing turquoise stream that flows through a slot canyon at the bottom, too narrow to fit a raft
through. Tom Martin, Craig Wolfson, and Leif Mortenson have already taken the 1950s boats as far up the creek as they
can, where a small waterfall blocks further progress. Havasu Canyon, through this bottom section, is barely a boat-width
wide; a trail paralells the creek atop the cliffs above. From here we can look down on the brightly-painted
red-white-and-blue boats.

Tom Martin has me stand in for Moulty Fulmer to re-stage a 1950s photo. I borrow Pam Mortenson’s floppy hat and stand
on a ledge ten feet above the water. There are several pauses to adjust my posture–arms folded, head turned toward
the creek, head down–and the work is done. In the original photo, Moulty Fulmer is standing on the same ledge, at the
same exact spot, but the water is nearly lapping at his toes, and there’s a boat tied in the creek at his feet–a boat
that would be hanging in empty space ten feet above the water if it were in the same place today. After my Moulty Fulmer role is over–Tom Martin is pleased with the photo re-creation, says it’s one of the best he’s
staged–I’m free to spend the day wandering up Havasu Canyon with Greg Hatten, Pam Mortenson, and Natalie, my
ten-year-old hiking partner from the Deer Creek loop hike. The trail crosses and recrosses Havasu Creek, whose water is
so bright and blue that you cannot even see the bottom of the creek, though the water is rarely higher than knee-deep.
Just like the Little Colorado Canyon, Havasu Creek is thick with calcium carbonate–chalk–which coats the mud and rocks
of the creek bottom with white, reflecting the blue of the sky. The brightly colored water is also much warmer than the
main Colorado, a good thing with all the wading we’re doing.

Greg and I continue up the canyon for a couple of hours after Pam and Natalie turn back, but eventually we reach a
stunning set of falls perhaps ten or fifteen feet high. Here the Southerners are hanging out in the pools beneath,
but it’s time for us to turn back–the plan is to leave Havasu Canyon by 4:00 p.m. and we have several miles to go
back to the boats. It’s a perfect day walking the canyon trails beside (and in) the bright blue tropical waters of
the creek, and our timing is perfect; we get back to the boats at 3:30.

The River Taketh Away–Again

It was a tough pull-in to get into Havasu Creek this morning, and it’s an even tougher one to get out. We have to row
out from the creek mouth at river left, all the way to the main channel at river left. Just below is the area of rocky
shallows that was so hard to avoid this morning. The wooden boats leave first, and they all make it. Some of the
Southerners leave next and also make it. Then Hazel, our first rafter, makes it–but not by much. There’s a stiff
wind blowing from river right to river left, and she has to fight not only the current sweeping downstream, but also
the wind blowing directly against her. But she fights through and makes it into the main channel.

Another Southerner unties and shoves off, only to discover that one of his oars is still lashed down to his boat.
There’s a moment of epic panic aboard his raft–he might have been able to leap into the knee-deep water of the creek
and pull his rented boat from Cross Chartering Yacht Transport back in until his oar was freed–but then he’s into the main Colorado heading directly toward the rocks. He has only one chance; if he slides down the extreme left side of the river he can pass between the cliffs along shore and the rocky shallows in the center. He makes it.

Then, Yoshie and Natalie set out. The wind gusts fiercely as she rows out, a long sustained blow directly into
Yoshie’s face. She doesn’t make it. Worse, she keeps trying, and makes it just far enough to be swept directly down
onto the rocky shallows, where her raft is stuck fast. And there they are, in the middle of the river, stuck. A fully loaded eighteen-foot raft can easily weigh a couple of thousand pounds.

It’s a nightmare scenario, potentially. Not dangerous, but incredibly tedious. Visions of unloading Yoshie’s raft,
removing the frames, deflating it, all this hassle is running through my head. For me, getting stuck has been my
biggest fear. A flip? You’re done quickly. Swimming a rapid? No big deal. But getting stuck? It’s the worst. I
don’t even see a way to get out to Yoshie’s raft without getting more boats stuck.

The Brits, though, leap into action. One of them throws a heaving line from the cliffs on shore, and now there’s a
line from shore to Yoshie’s boat. Meanwhile, two of their kayakers paddle out the the stuck raft and help Yoshie rig
for a strong pull. And then a half dozen people grab the shore end of the line on top of the cliffs. A few pulls and
the raft slides free. The ordeal is over. No helicopters or tedious unloading needed.

The River Giveth

I consider just meekly sliding down the far left channel after watching Yoshie’s rescue–I really don’t want to get
stuck by missing the channel on river right–but instead I just row HARD and keep rowing until I’m well past of the
rocks. Luckily the wind has died down and I make it, as do David Perez and Norm Takasugawa behind me. We slide
through a minor rapid just below Havasu Creek and then it’s just an easy mile and a half to our camp at 158.7-Mile
Camp on a set of rocky ledges at river right. And here, in the flat water, the river giveth back:

Just ahead of me, on an intercept course, is a light-colored almost tan something floating low in the water. It’s
about the size of a hat. About the size of the Tilley hat I lost earlier in the trip, actually, the one that floated
down Unkar Rapid without me. My raft floats nearer. I lean casually over the side of the boat and scoop it from the
water. It’s a hat.

A Tilley hat, well seasoned and beat-up, a floppy-brimmed bucket hat with a blue braid around the crown and fancy
snaps so you can fasten the sides of the brim to the top of the hat. A river hat to be sure. Not mine, but when I
try it on, it fits perfectly.

A mile later I’m in camp.

Note: remember, battery power is extremely limited; the blog could grind to a halt at any moment. If that happens,
it probably doesn’t mean that the much-anticipated biggest-rapid-in-the-Canyon Lava Falls, which we’ll be running
day after tomorrow, has gotten us all. Arnie Richards sent in his Solar Panel with Cece Mortenson when she hiked
in, and we are giving that a try to stay in power. Keep your fingers crossed.

Today, after yesterday’s layover at our OC’s camp near Deer Creek, we’ll be traveling about nineteen miles, where we’ll
stop at Last Chance camp on river right at mile 156. Last Chance is the final campsite above Havasu Creek, one of the
most popular side canyons along the river. We’ll be pulling in to Havasu tomorrow to re-create some historic photos
of Moulty Fulmer and Pat Reilly’s boats, so our camp at Last Chance will set us up perfectly for an early arrival.

Power Trouble Again

News on the generator front again–last night’s rising water washed away a critical part of the system, leaving us
with no diodes to generate current and recharge batteries. That means very few, if any, opporunities for recharging.
It also means this blog could come to an abrupt end at any time. Finally, it also meant half an hour of wading into
the rushing river this morning in full drysuits and PFDs to recover the pieces of the generator system that were
still in place.

The Colorado River Swim Club

Upset Rapid, the only rapid we stop to scout today, looks mean and ugly. On the far left, giant lateral waves smash
into the rock walls and rebound fiercely. In the center is a giant wave train and, at the bottom of the rapid, a huge
hole. And the right side is almost a smooth waveless run–except for a strong lateral wave midway that’s angled just
right to throw a raft back into the center to hit the huge hole.

I’m thinking a right run–hit the lateral wave hard and perpendicular and I should be able to slide by everything
else and miss the hole. Tom Martin, though, suggests a left-side run. If we enter the V just left of center, the
wave train should slide us right past the hole at the bottom. After watching both Tom in the Gem and Hazel in her
sixteen-foot raft make perfect left-side runs, I decide to try it.

Again the long slow slide down the tongue. This time nothing looks the same as it did scouting from shore, but
I’m dropping into some kind of a big wave. And then it’s all big waves and my raft is shooting straight down the
wave train. Everything’s slow, unhurried, even relaxed. I row just enough to keep my bow into the big waves–a few
strokes at most–and then I’m shooting past the giant hole at the bottom, barely touching its left side. Somehow
I’ve run Upset Rapid perfectly.

Yoshie, who follows, doesn’t. I’m eddied out below the rapid, waiting with Hazel, when whistles start to blow.
Yoshie is in the water, our fourth swimmer. All of the boats waiting below the rapid converge on Yoshie’s raft
as it comes bumping down the tailwaves, Yoshie still clinging to the side. She got separated from her raft at
some point but managed to swim back to it on her own; she just hasn’t been able to climb back aboard. It’s hard
to judge angles and current flows to intercept her, but with four boats all doing their best to cut Yoshie off,
we manage it. Craig Wolfson maneuvers the Susie R close enough to throw a line to Yoshie while someone else grabs
her raft. Soon she’s aboard again, all smiles. And the Colorado River Swim Club has found a new member. Four out
of eighteen people on the trip have swum at least part of a rapid.

Five miles past Upset Rapid we’re in camp on river right at Last Chance. The only indication of the day’s troubles
are the clothes Yoshie hangs up to dry outside her tent. So far so good.

Sorry for the short entry–conserving power. Two days until Lava Falls, the biggest rapid in the Canyon.

That day the wind blew strong and true up the Canyon, and the boatman rowed his raft into the teeth of it. It was not
easy. But then, he thought, you did not expect it to be easy. You did not want that. And the light was clean and bright
on the golden walls above them and the boatman rowed the way the old river rats had showed him, a smooth strong pull
and a pronounced forward lean as he sank the oar blades into the water and he feathered the oars on each stroke and
his arms were bare as a boatman’s should be, though it was really too cold for bare arms and he did not have the abs
of a true boatman anyway. Still, it was good to be rowing in the chill air of the Canyon morning and it was good to
have bare arms and to be as much of a boatman as he could be even without the abs. He tried to match the straightness
and the trueness of the wind with the strokes of his rowing and although he did not completely succeed he did not
completely fail either.

And the wind blew. First there were four boats ahead of him, then three, and then he remembered what the old river
rats had told him, that it was now, when the wind blew, that you could tell who the real rowers were. And his oar
blades dipped faster, and he pulled more strongly, and soon there were only two boats ahead of him.

And here the Canyon narrowed. Tall walls of schist and granite rose on each side. Above him now was a huge cave and
as he rowed he stared into its mouth and he pulled hard on the oars and he thought about this place, how it was the
narrowest part of the Canyon and here he was between the walls of it, rowing.

And the wind still blew. And the boatman rowed. And as he rowed he thought about his lost hat, a hat that had been
with him for many years and had just been reaching the perfect broken-in-ness that the hat of a true boatman should
have, and he remembered the sight of the hat floating down the left side of Unkar Rapid. He had hoped then to recover
the hat at the bottom of the rapid, but he had not been able to. But then, he thought, you did not really expect to
recover the hat. You had only hoped.

But the hat had floated away down the left side of Unkar and he had floated down the right side and he had never
seen the hat again. But the river still flowed downstream between the red walls and the giant fins of schist and as
he rowed the boatman thought that if he had had to lose his hat somewhere and not recover it then the Canyon was a
fitting place to do it. After all, he thought, you can always get another hat. It is true that it will take many
years to break in a new hat, but that is a small price to pay for a trip down the Canyon.

For the Canyon exacts a price of every man who runs it, the boatman knew. And if his hat was to be that price then
he would count himself lucky to have gotten away with something so foolish at so little cost. For the boatman had
never rowed whitewater before and the size and the steepness and the explosiveness of the waves in the big rapids
surprised him still and as he slid down the tongue of each big rapid the jittery feeling he had had the first time,
at Badger Creek Rapid, returned again and again. But then, he thought, you did not expect anything different when
you began this trip.

And the wind blew, and the boatman rowed on. And as he rowed he felt the chill of the morning and the coolness of
the wind on his bare arms and because he no longer had a hat he wore a blue bandana tied on his head. And there
were the inevitable comments about pirates from his companions. But then, the boatman thought, you knew they would
make those comments when you tied the bandana on your head. You did not expect anything different. And soon there
was only one boat ahead of him.

And here the river became a mass of swirling eddies that formed circling whirlpools between the granite walls and
as he rowed the boatman reflected on what he had learned of eddies. You did not expect so many eddies, he thought.
You expected the river to flow downstream. And yet, most of the river did not flow downstream, the boatman knew now.
Most of the river was a mass of circling water that waited to snare passing rafts. Or, the boatman thought, if you
are trying to eddy out to wait for your companions, the swirling water will do its best to keep you out. Yes, the
boatman thought, that is a fair definition of what an eddy is. An eddy is a place in the river that when you want
to pass by, it sucks you in. And when you want to enter the eddy, it spits you out.

But then, the boatman thought, you did not expect this to be easy. You did not want that.

And the wind blew straight and true and the boatman dipped his oars into the water and leaned back slightly as he
pulled and leaned far forward at the end of the stroke and rolled his wrists to feather the oar blades the way the
old river rats had showed him and his boat surged forward into the wind and the boatman’s bare arms were warm in
the sun now and the shade was gone and without the wind it would have been hot. But the wind kept blowing.

You did not expect the wind, the boatman thought. That is something that you were not prepared for. Still, you did
not want it to be easy, for then a run down the Canyon would be no different than a stop at the South Rim visitor
center. And as he rowed the boatman thought about that visitor center, and how it had been there that he had been
given his first knife by his father. And he remembered how he had worn the knife on his belt for the rest of the
summer, and for many summers after that. He thought, too, about the mules and about how he had wanted to ride one
of them down the dusty trail to Phantom Ranch and how disappointed he had been when he had not been allowed to do so.

And now, the boatman thought, you have been to Phantom Ranch. You have walked the dusty trails at the bottom of the
Canyon and you have petted a white mule in a dusty corral and you have called the mule by name as you petted him and
wished for a carrot to give to him in the loneliness and the dust of the corral. Although, the boatman thought, you
did not really know his name and it was only a guess that the mule was called Whitey. Still, the mule had not
objected. He had even leaned his head sideways into the petting and scratching and had stood there a long while and
had stared hopefully after you as you had walked away.

It was in the canteen, the boatman thought, that you had paid your last three dollars for two lemonades and had
taken them out into the shade outside the canteen and drunk them one after the other. The last time you had been
in the Canyon you got a knife, he thought. And this time, two lemonades. The lemonades had been tart and cold and
the bottom of the cups had been filled with ice and he had drunk them both without pausing between, one after
another, drinking them so quickly that your teeth ached with the cold. And they had been good lemonades, perhaps
the best he had ever tasted.

But now he was rowing and the boat was pointed into the wind and his arms were bare as a boatman’s should be and
he did not put on his rain jacket or even his fleece pullover in the small rapids. He ran them straight and he
pulled at the oars to keep the bow of the boat pointed into the waves and he did not flinch as the water splashed
over his face and on his bare arms. After all, he thought, you did not expect it to be dry. And it was not dry.

And as he rowed the boatman thought about his camera, and how it had perhaps not been a good idea to leave the
camera beside him on the rowing bench as he had run that last small rapid. He picked up the camera and pressed
the power button but nothing happened. But then, the boatman thought, you did not expect it to work now. Still,
he thought, perhaps it is only that the batteries in the camera are dead. And the wind blew, and the boatman kept rowing. And now there were no boats ahead of him, and the boatman thought
that that was perhaps not a good thing. Because, he thought, you do not know where we are going. Your map is
tucked away into a dry bag at the very bottom of a pile of other people’s dry bags and there is no way you will
be able to get at the map now. And even if you could get at the map, the boatman thought, you do not know the
name of the camp we are planning to stay at and you do not know where the camp is or how far downriver.

And the wind blew, and the boatman rowed, and the map stayed buried in the black dry bag at the bottom of the
raft and soon they would be passing a camp whose name he did not know and behind him a long line of boats
followed where the boatman rowed.

Today’s run takes us nine miles from our camp at the foot of Forster Canyon at river mile 123 to Galloway, a long thin sandy beach stretched out along the right side of the river at mile 132.

It’s past time to record some hellos and goodbyes: Crystal Elliot and Randy Dersham left us after Day 10, hiking out to the rim on the morning of Day 11 to go back to the world of gainful employment and hot showers. Today will be our second day without them. Ian McCluskey and Yoshie Kobayashi will be rowing Crystal’s raft, hoping to
maintain her perfect record: no flips, no swims. Crystal will also be missed–by everyone in camp–at dinner, because her departure leaves Dave Mortenson and me as the final members of our cook team. Crystal has been the brains of the operation. Meanwhile we’ve been joined by Richard Carrier, a French raft guide who has been living and working in Chile. He’ll be rowing Randy’s Susie Too replica for the rest of the trip. And Randy has left one more thing with us: his hat, with its crazily spiked gray hair. It has spent too much time in the river (ten-year-old Natalie has gotten used to fishing it out) to feel comfortable leaving now, apparently.

Power Update

Still uncertain. We should be able to manage some recharging–that’s the latest word–but again, if the blog suddenly disappears, it’s a battery problem and not a disaster. We’re hoping to keep it up but you never know.

Here We Go Again

Morning starts with WIND, and there’s sand in everything before breakfast is over and the boats are loaded. But it’s a tailwind today and we make good time past a series of small rapids: Fossil, Hundred and Twenty-Seven Mile, Hundred and Twenty-Eight Mile, and Specter. Along the way Tom Martin stops Gem at river right, where he’s spotted the setting from a 1958 photo from Moulty Fulmer and Pat Reilly’s dory trip.

It doesn’t take much searching before we find the exact spot where the 1958 photographer stood to snap a photo of the original Gem, Flavell, and Susie R tied up beside the rocks. A distant corner in the Tapeats Sandstone lines up in the background on river left, the sharp profile of a black schist boulder in the foreground, and Tom has the exact location to place the boats for the rematch. The water level on our trip is about six feet lower than in the 1958 photo, but the replica rowers decline to drag their boats up the rocks for a precise re-enactment. A few
photos and we’re off.

Today is the first day we’ve had clouds; there’s a front moving in on us, pushing us along. The river, which had been flowing generally westward for the last few miles before Forster Camp, turns northward, or a little east of north. We’re headed toward Bedrock Rapid a few miles downstream.

Bedrock Rapid

This one we stop to scout, pulling in to a small eddy on river right. Another three-camera set-up. Bedrock Rapid, done properly, is a one-move run. Slide down the right side of the rapid and, where a huge outcropping of rock forms an island in the middle of the rapid, pull hard to catch the right-hand channel past the island. You’re done.

Go left and it’s not always that simple. Most of the river channel, maybe two-thirds of the flow, sweeps left past the rocky island. There’s a narrow rock passage with big holes and pourovers along the narrow run close along the island’s left side, with a big eddy to pinball you off the walls on the left. You have to stick close to the island if you run left, which brings its own hazards. The last time Norm Takasugawa ran left, on an earlier trip, he came out without a right oar. “I never felt anything,” he says. “But when I lifted my right oar, there was no blade on it. I was holding a toothpick.” The same thing happened to three boats ahead of him.

The camera set-up is probably the most difficult part of the run for us, though. Ian McCluskey, our videographer, wants Norm to land him ON the rocky island so he can shoot a head-on view. Meanwhile David Perez is filming from shore at the top of the rapid, and Dave Mortenson is taking still shots at the point of no return, where  boaters have to pull hard right to enter the right-hand channel.

Norm takes the first run, proving that there’s no drama here if you do it right. After he lands Ian on the island, Hazel clark follows to be the stand-by safety boat for the rest of us. When the cameras are ready, Leif Mortenson is next, rowing the replica Flavell. The hard boats like Leif’s Flavell have a trickier run; where the rafts were
able to bump along the shallows at the far right side of the rapid, making the pull into the right channel shorter and easier, the hard boats have to go a little further into the rapid so they don’t bang into the rocks.

But Leif goes too far left into the rapid, and drama ensues. I’m up at my raft getting ready to launch when word comes upstream that Leif has gone left, down the wrong side of the island, and has disappeared. Looking at one of Dave Mortenson’s still photos in camp later that night, I can see it must have been ugly. There’s a fantastic shot of Leif’s boat headed directly toward the granite prow of the island, stern in the water, and the bow launched skyward at a forty-five degree angle. Somehow, though, Leif comes through unscathed, although his boat takes a few hits on the rock. I ask him later what happened.

“What do you mean ‘What happened?'” he says. “I fucked up.” What he means is that he misjudged his entrance and came in too far left. Then, as he neared the point of no return where he had to decide which channel to take, it became obvious that he wasn’t going to make the hard right pull into the safer channel. And worse, if he TRIED the hard right pull and didn’t make it, he’d smash directly onto the rocky cliffs of the island, into some ugly boulders and big waves. Instead, he did the smart thing and went to Plan B: head down the left side of the island and hope to make the best of it. He came out at the bottom after threading the needle between some vicious rock ledges, with his boat intact and with all of his gear–including his oars–still with him. And with one more thing: a lifetime membership in the “Left At Bedrock” Club. Later in camp Norm and Craig Wolfson, who has also run left at Bedrock, show him the secret handshake.

I get to follow Leif’s dramatic run–not a confidence builder–but again, in a raft it proves easy. Yoshie Kobayashi follows in her raft; she comes a little closer to getting swept into the rocky island, but makes it in the end with some hard rowing, never giving up until she’s safe in the right-hand channel.

Greg Hatten runs the Portola through after her, and thanks to a missed oar stroke at a critical moment, comes closer than he likes to getting hurled into the island’s granite prow. But then he goes back upstream to run the Susie Too through–Richard Carrier, our new rower, doesn’t want to risk smashing up an unfamiliar and very-much-not-his-own boat–and this time Greg hits it perfectly, with plenty of room to spare as he sails into the rightward channel, demonstrating how a wooden boat should handle Bedrock Rapid.

Two miles later and we’re in camp at Galloway on river right, hauling heavy kitchen gear, food boxes, and dry bags up a steep sandbank. No matter how the rapids are run, in the end it all comes down to hauling heavy stuff up the beach at night, and packing it up and hauling it back down in the morning. We get our first rain as the dinner crew is cooking–they rig a tarp over the kitchen, propping it up with eight oars–but the rain dies down quickly. It’s a little chilly compared to the weather we’ve been having–I spent most of the day in a fleece pull-over instead of shirtless as usual, and in camp I pull out my long underwear, top and bottom, but one look around at the sunlit buttes and cliffs far overhead, the chocolate brown river sliding by, the immense space of the desert, and there’s hardly reason to complain.

We’re halfway through the twenty-four-day trip to Pearce Ferry.

March 31
Today we run from Hotauta at river mile to 108 Upper Forster, a wide sandy beach tucked in at river left below Forster Canyon at river mile 123.5 or so. The Colorado runs generally westward here, except for a giant U-bend southward from mile 114 to mile 119. By the way, I’m taking all references to river miles, names and ratings of rapids, and campsite locations from Tom Martin and Duwain Whitis’s Rivermaps book: Guide to the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon (Fourth Edition, 2008). This is an excellent book, with 1:24,000-scale topographical maps of the Canyon in 11″ x 17″ size. Instead of the typical “north at the top” map, the book’s river maps are laid out so upstream is always at the bottom of the page. Facing each map is a page of text explaining the geology, historical sites, and sane rapid runs through the rapids on the current map–and like the map, the text reads from the bottom up. It sounds like an odd layout, but it works well. So well that I’ve been keeping my map book tucked safely away in my bottom dry bag, pulling it out each night at camp to see where I’ve been that day. This is my only chance to run Grand Canyon for the first time; I don’t want to know too much about it ahead of time. It’s a far cry from the uncertainty Powell and the other earlier explorers would have faced, but it’s all I’ve got, and it’s worth preserving.

But even with Glen Canyon Dam in place, it’s still a big river, draining a huge watershed and running at flows eight to ten times higher than the big whitewater rivers of the Northwest (the MacKenzie, the Rogue), even at today’s lower water levels. And while we started the trip with the river running green and cold–evidence of its origins deep in the bottom of Lake Powell–for the last few days the Colorado has been living up to its name. Snow melt above the Little Colorado, or a localized storm above one of the tributary streams that has washed silt and debris into the main channel, maybe; but whatever it is, the Colorado River has been running brown–the exact color of chocolate milk. Still way too cold to swim, though.

Powering Down
Generator trouble. There’s a lot of talk about the ifference between voltage and current, and cross-wiring, and meters showing power that somehow isn’t reaching the battery. The short version: our power system may be on its last legs. Don’t be surprised if the blog grinds to a halt in the next day or so. I have no idea how long our batteries will last, or if they can, in fact, be recharged.

Elves’ Chasm
Today there’s a traffic jam on the river: our group of ten boats have been joined by three other rafting groups, putting a total of about forty boats on the water together. I’m in the middle of the pack, and as far as I can see, upstream or down, are boats: white rafts, purple rafts, yellow rafts, our own red-white-and-blue dories and cataract boats. It’s what I imagine the summer high season must be like, with a commercial trip around every bend. Makes me glad we’re running in March and April. We’ve had perfect weather so far, sunny skies and warm enough that the inevitable splashing of the rapids feels refreshing rather than unpleasant.

We pull in for lunch just above a tiny side canyon called Elves’ Chasm. Here a short hike up a rocky trail leads to a tiny waterfall pouring into a chest-deep pool. A cold pool. Cold enough to stop me, but Ian McCluskey and David Perez are brave (foolish?) enough to swim it. David even climbs up behind the waterfall and leaps in, the classic Elves’ Chasm move.
There’s another group there ahead of us, Southerners in yellow boats. They’re the same ones we watched run Horn Creek Rapid without scouting. Now one of them has lost his glasses–he made the waterfall jump with them, and came out without them. He stands disconsolate at the edge of the pool while the rest of his group makes dive after dive into the cold water searching. Finally they give up and lie in the sun. He’ll be doing the rest of the trip without Forster.

Canyoneering
It’s a long day on the river if you go by mileage, but we’re helped along by the first tailwind of the trip–a wind strong enough to take my Widmer Brothers cap off my head and drop it in the river. It’s the second hat I’ve lost; my floppy-brimmed cotton hat ended up in the water at the top of Unkar Rapid. While Yoshie rowed us through the big waves, I spent my time staring at my hat floating a parllel line just left of us. But we parted ways near the bottom of the rapid and I’ve never seen my hat again. I still get hopeful every time I see a blob of foam that looks like it could be a hat, but chances are good it’s gone forever. I do at least manage to regain my Widmer Brothers hat. It’s hot enough that putting the soaking wet hat on my head feels good.

“I did that on purpose,” I tell the rest of the group as I pull my hat out of the muiddy water. They know me too well to believe me.
At camp it’s my night off. I unload my boat, set up my tent at the top of the beach and throw my dry bags in to weight it down against the wind, and shamelessly take off on a hike up Forster Canyon while all the work is still going on: setting up the kitchen, the camp chairs, the hydro generator, all the incredibly heavy and cumbersome gear that goes with river camping. I ignore it all–I admit to a few pangs of conscience, but only a few–and set off up the dry wash that runs through Forster Canyon.

It’s easy going at first, a gravelly roadbed that looks like the track of a D-9 cat dragging its blade through the desert. About a mile upstream, though, I come to obstacle number one: a dead-end ampitheater where a trickle of water pours off an overhanging wall forty feet up. I’m able to backtrack down the canyon a hundred yards and scramble up a steep scree slope on the left canyon wall, through a curtain of thick thorny trees. Once on top, though, I’m in a wide grassy valley criss-crossed by sheep tracks–desert bighorns.
Above the first pourover the canyon floor is bedrock, smooth slabs of gray limestone as flat as a floor. A ways further and I hit the next obstacle–three huge boulders fallen into the canyon that block further progress. The bottom boulder is an easy slab, and then I’m fored to layback up the side of the top boulder. It’s not too difficult, even in Tevas, but I’m twenty-five feet above the bedrock floor and it’s plenty spooky. And once I’m up I immediately have doubts about being able to layback back DOWN the boulder. There’s no alternative, though; it’s the only way. I decide to burn that bridge when I come to it, and press on.

Above the boulders there’s an incredible din; it sounds like a sheep pen, bleating and baa-ing. Turns out it’s dozens and dozens of spotted frogs splashing around in pockets of water. This section of the canyon is so narrow that I stem through with one foot and one hand on each wall, traversing above waist-deep pools of water. At the upper end of the narrows is another obstacle: a steep rounded water groove cut into the gray rock above a knee-deep pool. There are no handholds; I resort to pressing hard with hands and feet, chimneying my way up. Again, once I’m up I wonder what down will be like. But keep going anyway. A little further up the canyon a desert bighorn–a ewe–scampers off at my approach. I’m definitely in sheep country here.

I’m nearing the base of the Redwall Limestone now, over a thousand feet above camp. There’s a final obstacle–or it looks like it MIGHT be the final one: another steep water groove, this one maybe forty feet high. The first ten feet go easily, with flat ledges for feet. Then I’m smearing and frictioning my way up. Just above is a huge rock ampitheater cut into the canyon walls. If I get up this I’ll be there.
But thirty feet up–just a few moves from the top–I start wondering again about getting down. It’s getting late, too. And I’m here alone, facing a long cold night if I get stuck somewhere. Not to mention that I’m chicken. I start downclimbing instead. It takes me fifteen minutes to work my way down the polished water groove that I scrambled up in two minutes.

The return downcanyon is interesting. Every hundred yards or so I come to a tricky downclimb and have to pause to figure it out. “How the hell did I get up this?” I ask myself over and over. Getting darker. I’ve probably missed supper by now. The big downclimbs–the smooth water grooves, the layback boulder–are bad, but not as bad as they might have been. Even the thorny scree slope isn’t too bad; it’s much easier to go through the brush from above. I’m able to step on the worst thorny branches and mash them out of my way. Then I’m on the canyon floor’s bulldozed gravel track again. The sun is long down, but there’s enough light to see by if I don’t look too hard at anything. I start running down the track. A half mile later I hear the roar of Forster Rapid. I’m back at camp.

When I get back, the dishes crew is washing up after supper. It’s fully dark, and they’ve got their two propane lanterns burning. The rest of the group has been wondering when–or maybe if–I’d find my way back. It’s nice to have people watching out for you.
They’ve even set aside a bowl of food for me. I eat it in the dark. Whatever it is, it’s tasty: rice and something-or-other. A perfect canyon day.

Day 10: Crystal Rapid

March 30

Today’s run takes us from Schist Camp at river mile 96.5 to Hotauta, 108 miles downriver from Lee’s Ferry. Blue
skies and sunny weather all day, temperatures in the 80s. It’ll be another perfect day in a perfect trip. Along the way we’ll hit Crystal Rapid. Rated a 9 of 10, this will be our biggest water yet–a seventeen foot drop with
some rocks at right, a couple of big holes in the middle, and Slate Creek Eddy on river left. After the
notorious Lava Falls, Crystal might be the biggest rapid in Grand Canyon.

After breakfast we cruise downriver for about two miles and then pull in to scout Crystal on river right. It’s
another complicated three-camera set-up for filming, which means a long time to wait on shore watching the giant
waves exploding, imagining what they can do to a boat or raft caught there. Greg Hatten is waiting on shore with me, getting ready to run the replica Portola through Crystal. “If we’re going
to scout this long, they need to set up the groover,” he says. I know what he means.

The waves are big, with a couple of holes that look like they might be able to eat an eighteen-foot raft; on the
left, Slate Creek Eddy waits, like a stretch of river that’s seen the imprint of a giant hand which has pressed
down on the water so hard that the water level in the eddy is several feet lower than the main channel. Get caught
in there and I’m not sure anyone could row out without getting pinballed off the rock walls. There’s plenty to
think about here.

Finally word comes that the cameras are ready–rafts run first. I manage to delay my departure long enough that
Hazel Clark and Yoshie Kobayashi, go first. My trick backfires, though; by the time I row out toward the rapid,
Hazel and Yoshie have already made the first drop and are out of sight below. I won’t be able to follow her line.

The entry doesn’t seem too tricky, though, after talking it over with Craig Wolfson, Norm Takasugawa, and Tom
Martin on shore. I have to row across the river from our scout point on river right, and drop down the far left
side of the smooth green tongue that leads down into the waves, bypassing the first big hole on its left edge.
If I make that entry point, the rest of the line might take care of itself.

Down the Tongue

There’s a prolonged anticipation as you slide down the smooth V at the top of a big rapid. There’s nothing you
can do to avoid whatever’s waiting, and very little you can do to hurry it along. The raft gently gathers momentum;
there’s time for a lateral adjustment or two, a rush of second guessing (am I too far right? left?), and a moment
to ask yourself, ‘Where am I going, and why am I in this handbasket?’ and then you’re into it.

Now, at the top of Crystal, it’s time to turn the bow into the waves. I’ve set it up perfectly this time, right
where I want to be, and everything’s working as planned. The raft punches through the far left side of the first
hole and we’re into the series of big waves down the left side of the rapid–a run known as Crystal Highway,
I find out later. But highway or not, we’re into some big water once we’re off the tongue. The first wave grabs
my oar blades and yanks me off my seat, and the next jerks both oars out of my hands for a moment. The river,
it turns out, will do whatever it wants with you, no matter how perfect your entry is.

I grab my oars again, dig the right oar into the water and pull hard, just in time to take another big wave
head-on. This one launches the bow so high it feels like we’re catching air off the top. The rest of the rapid
is just riding the wave train until only one obstacle remains: the rock garden at the bottom.

This rocky island can be passed either on the left or on the right. Hit it, though, and your raft will stick and
stick hard. It may take motor rigs or helicopters to get you off then. I decided ahead of time that I’d run down
the right side of the island. When I come to the bottom of the rapid, though, I’m almost pinned against the rock
wall on the left side of the river above the rock garden. That’ll make a right-hand passage around the rocks a
very hard pull.

I’m almost dumb enough to try it, though, pulling left in a doomed attempt to stick to my original plan. Luckily,
though, I give up after half a pull at the oars and point the bow downstream into the left channel instead. A few
more big waves and a short sharp drop and I’m through. Tom Martin, rowing the replica Gem three boats after, is not so lucky.

“You want to be in the right place,” he tells me later, “and then you want the timing to work out.” Which doesn’t
happen for Tom at Crystal today.

Swimmer!

“I went just too far right, in the left run,” Tom explains. “just a misjudgment.”

Maybe a boat-width too far right; maybe catching a wave at the wrong time, just as it goes big; maybe some
combination of the two–whatever happened, Tom was in trouble almost immediately after entering the rapid.
The first big wave after the initial hole caught the Gem and flipped it over, and Tom ended up under the boat.

“It took a long time to swim clear or the boat,” he says. “A long time being…five seconds?”

Tom was able to work his way out from under the boat, though, and climbed up onto the upside-down hull. For a
while it looked like the Gem would be bounced off the left wall at the base of Slate Creek Eddy; then it looked
like it was heading directly toward the rock garden–either of those would be disastrous for a wooden boat. Tom
was trying to decide if the boat would have a better chance of clearing the rocks if he jumped off to lighten it
when the problem solved itself.

“We stopped going toward the rock garden and started going into the left channel,” he says. “And the left
channel is a good place to be.”

Tom’s wife Hazel met him at the bottom of the rapid, rowing out to intercept the overturned Gem. She tried to
throw Tom a line to pull him aboard her raft.

“I said, ‘No, I don’t want a rope, I want you,'” Tom says. So Hazel had to jump into the cold river, grab the
flip line, and help Tom turn the boat over, something he hadn’t been able to do on his own. With the two of them,
the boat popped over easily and the crisis was past.

“And we pulled into a little cove and the bottom,” Tom finishes, “and just spent the next, I don’t know, twenty
minutes bailing out all the hatches.”

The rest of the group makes it through without problems, with Norm the odd man out as usual, running the right
side where everyone else ran left. That’s Norm. We’re doing all right, but we’ve had people in the water three
days in a row: Hazel, Randy, and now Tom. All of them experienced river runners. So far the rookies (Crystal
Elliot, David Perez, and I) have avoided major mishaps.

So far…

March 29

Today’s run takes us from Clear Creek Camp, on river right at mile 84.5 to Schist Camp at river left, mile 96.5.
Along the way we’ll stop at Phanton Ranch. Until this trip I’ve always thought of Phantom Ranch as the “real”
Grand Canyon. Tucked along Phantom Creek at the bottom of Bright Angel Trail, Phantom Ranch had the allure of
the hard-to-reach. It seemed more authentic than the South Rim visitor center–at least when I last visited
Grand Canyon. But that was when I was six years old, and riding a mule train to the bottom of the Canyon seemed
like an adventure.

The Kaibab suspension bridge above Phantom Ranch in 1957. Fulmer and Reilly found this rapid here, at about
105,000 cubic feet per second. When we paddled through at around 10,000 cfs, this stretch was flat water.

The Boat Beach at Phantom Ranch lies about 88 miles downstream from Lee’s Ferry, and it’s our first return to
civilization in the past eight days. We land there at about 10:30, refill all the boats’ water jugs, and then
I have some time to visit the canteen, where I buy a couple of ice-cold lemonades and some postcards
(“delivered by mule from the bottom of the Grand Canyon,” the stamp at the bottom reads, and it’s true). But
of course I’ve left my address book in the bottom of my very bottom dry bag, strapped to the floor of my raft
under three other bags and a contraption of plastic boat fenders intended to float the hydro generator that
Dave and Leif Mortenson have brought along.

I fill out the cards whose addresses I remember–nieces an nephews, parents, wife–and then it’s back to the
boats for lunch.

Powering Up

The contraption of linked plastic boat fenders rides on my raft, lashed down on a heap of ry bags. You’d
never guess what it’s for, but I had the chance to help Dave and Leif set up the whole hydro generator system
a couple of nights ago, at our camp above Hance Rapid. The generator itself is a bright blue motor with a
propellor about the size of one you’d find on an outboard motor. The idea is to face the propellor into the
current, where its water-driven spinning will generate somewhere between one and four amps. The idea is a good one; the execution problematic. First, all this stuff is heavy, and has to be hauled a
good distance downstream for the set-up. There, while Leif gets the motor ready, Dave bolts together three
sections of steel shelving support. This makes a cross-arm twelve feet long. A vertical PVC shaft from the
motor gets hose-clamped to this bar, which will then–somehow–get lodeged between two boulders to hold the
entire assembly in place, with the plastic fenders lashed on to float the motor off the bottom. And the motor
itself is housed inside a steel cage.

Norm, who carries this cage aboard his raft, has lashed a set of what looks like some sort of pelvic bones
to it. The bones hang there all day long, looking remarkably like a bird that someone has forgotten to feed
for a very long time. Norm calls it his condor cage.

Now the motor unit is ready, and complications ensue. First, the motor itself is heavy. So is the twelve-foot steel beam it’s lashed to. And the float system–four
plastic fenders held together on threaded steel rods–is bulky. And the whole ungainly thing has to be placed
into the current between two rocks, just above Hance Rapid. Somehow Leif, still in his waterproof paddling
clothes, manages to manhandle it into place so that each end of the steel cross-arm is lodged against the
upstream side of a boulder. Immediatedly the current catches the upstream side of the floats, shoving them
underwater with tremendous force. The steel crossarm’s outer segments bend upward like wings, and the whole
thing is on the verge of collapse. After messing around with reinforcing cables to hold it in place and reduce
the strain, Leif and Dave decide adjustments are needed. It’s working, though; about 1.5 to 2 amps.

Next they decide to re-bolt the cross-arm together, this time using shorter sections of steel shelving supports
to overlap the joints and prevent the bending. And Leif decides the floats are causing most of the drag, so
he removes them. But the hose clamps are no match for the Colorado River, so Dave goes back to the boats to
fetch some c-clamps, which they use to clamp the condor cage to the motor unit. Then they decide to try another
spot just downstream instead. This time it works much better–but the meter reads only 3/4 of an amp. Back to
the first spot, manhandling the whole collection upstream and lodging it between the first two boulders again.

Finally the unit is in place, generating two to four amps. Leif has been wading around in 47-degree water above
a major rapid for at least two hours, but the unit is working well. It’ll recharge the marine batteries that are
powering our camera gear and laptops. The generator system is necessary–this blog wouldn’t exist without it–but,
at least now, while Dave and Leif are still working out the system–incredibly cumbersome. More work than I’d be
inclined to do if left on my own. Seeing the whole thing go together makes me grateful there are people on this
trip willing to do what it takes to make it work.

Leaving Phantom Ranch

Finally we’re ready to leave Phantom Ranch. There one minor rapid–Pipe Creek–about a mile below the Boat Beach.
Nothing to worry about, except for a fierce eddy that’s supposed to be hard to get out of. We’re warned to stay
well away from the right side. Whatever you do, you don’t want to get caught in the eddy below Pipe Creek Rapid.

“That’s a strong, strong eddy,” Norm tells me later. But not the strongest. Below Bedrock Rapid, he says, a big
snout boat (twp bridge pontoons with a metal frame between, over twenty feet long) got caught in an eddy and had
to go around twenty-two times–and that was with four strong river guides at the oars.

The eddy below Pipe Creek is nowhere near as strong as that. I break free after only three laps.

Horn Creek Rapid

After escaping Pipeline’s eddy, we’ve got an afternoon of big rapids: Horn Creek (8), Granite (8), and Hermit (8).
We pull in at river right to scout Horn Creek from a rocky ledge. The “horns” are two boulders, on at about the center of the river, and the other a couple of boatlengths to the
left of it. One run would be to thread the needle between the horns, an eight-foot drop. Another possibility is
to start right of the horns, and pull HARD across the current as you leave the V, which will be doing everything
it can to suck you into a big hole at river right, and smash you into a wall of rock.

As we’re scouting, a group in five yellow rafts runs Horn Creek without scouting. The first boat slides down
the V, the boatman barely pushing, and gets sucked into the hole and tossed aound like an epileptic rhinocreous,
smashing into the rock wall at river right before spinning free. After the next four boats make the same
run–some of them smashing a wall at river right, some hitting lower at river left–the route between the
horns looks better. Tom Martin runs it first to make sure there’s enough water, and most of us follow.

As I return from the scouting ledge, Dave Mortenson is waiting by my boat.

“I’m going to ride with you,” he tells me. He’s a brave man.

I line up between the horns and turn the raft downstream. Then there’s just time for a quick “Hangen sie onnen sie”
to Dave and the bow is dropping into the rapid. Dropping WAAAAY down, where it hits the first wave and is lifted
up. Dave–hanging onto the lid of my bow compartment–is thrown head over heels backward when he discovers I’ve
neglected to lash the lid closed. Meanwhile I’m thrown off my seat and only a tight grip on the oars keeps me
aboard.

A couple more big waves and we’re through the worst of it, but the rock wall at the bottom left is coming up fast.
I’m pulling hard at the oars, but I’m not going to make it. “We’re going to hit,” I tell Dave, who is back upright
in his seat. “Hang on.”

Then, just as our bow is about to bounce off the rocks, a wave lifts the bow over the foot of the cliff. We clear
the wall by a few inches, and we’re done.

Granite Rapid

Granite Rapid is a non-event for me, a ride down a train of big waves. Randy Dersham’s ride is a little more
exciting.

“I joined the Colorado Swim Club,” he says. “That sounds so much better, it’s better for my pride.”

What Randy means is that, like Hazel, he has managed to swim a big Grand Canyon rapid.

“I came down through the top part of the rapid and got up on the line, and was feeling like I was really in
the right spot,” Randy explains. Then the Susie Too feinted right, then hard left, and Randy was thrown over
the port side of the boat. And he had a camera mounted on the back of the boat, recording it all.

“Man, that was a major face plant into the water,” Greg Hatten says, watching the video footage later in camp;
we’re all crowded around Randy’s laptop watching the dramatic clip, and there’s a chorus of exclamations as
Randy is thrown from the boat. “Face plant” is a good way to describe it–Randy enters the water headfirst,
almost as if he’s diving in on purpose. He did manage to keep hold of the port gunwale, and rode the rest of
Granite Rapid clinging to the side of the boat. He managed to throw one leg over the side but couldn’t climb
aboard. At the bottom David Perez pulled him from the water, no harm done.

Well, almost no harm: for the second time in two days, Randy has lost his hat. It’s quite a hat–a camoflage
ball cap brim with a wildly spiked shock of grey-white hair standing up above. The fake hair of the hat
matches Randy’s own hair so perfectly that it took me three days to realize he was wearing a hat instead
of a visor.

But the hat is gone, for the second time. And the river gives few second chances.

Hermit Rapid

Unlike Horn Creek and Granite, we don’t even pause to scout Hermit. Which, to tell the truth, is a bit
unnerving, because I’m the second boat in line. And when I see Hazel turn her raft down the tongue without
stopping, I realize I’ll be running my next big rapid soon. Very soon. insert photo 58-2-28

Brick Mortenson (foreground left), Duane Norton (right) and Pat Reilly (background) scouting Hermit Rapid
on their 1958 run. They had left their boats on the Boat Beach in 1957, pulling out because of the extreme
high water, and returned to finish the journey the next year.

It doesn’t look like much from above, but Hermit Rapid, it turns out, is a huge series of waves. I’m
skeptical of guesses at wave heights, but these are BIG. At the top of each wave, the bow of my raft shoots
way up into the sky, overhanging the crest while the stern is only halfway up the wave face. It’s
ridiculous–I feel like my raft is climbing up a series of vertical faces. There’s nothing to do but
laugh maniacally as I go over wave after wave after wave after wave, each one bigger than the last, each one
big enough to seem impossible.

Nothing to do but hit ’em straight. A mile downstream we’re in camp on river left–where 10-year-old Natalie Mortenson (a fourth generation
river runner: Brick Mortenson, his son Dave, Dave’s son Leif, and now Natalie have all made Canyon trips
before) returns his hat.

A second chance after all.

A half dozen rafts and a few kayaks from other trips pass through Hance as Ian McCluskey, our videographer, sets up to film the replica boats’ run. It’s a complicated multi-camera shooting schedule–one camera above the rapid on river right across from camp, another on the high scouting dune, and boat-mounted cameras on some of the replica boats–which looks like a big mess to me, but Ian seems to know what he’s doing. It’s nice to watch the other groups make the run first, and they all go through without problems. Then it’s time: launch on two-minute intervals, with the rafts first so the camera operators can practice.
Tom Martin’s wife Hazel, an experienced river runner and Canyon veteran, goes first, with Pam Mortenson as a passenger. And somehow without really meaning to be there, I’m next in line. I glance at the watch velcroed to my raft frame to time my two minutes as Hazel shoves off and starts rowing toward river right and the entrance to Hance Rapid.
She drifts in sideways to the current to be able to make final lateral adjustments to her approach. But somehow she has lined up directly over the boulder. Worse yet, she’s still sideways as she slides over it. Imagine a car parked in a driveway, and the pavement under the left side of the car suddenly drops five feet while the wheels on the right stay at the same level–that’s what happens to Hazel’s raft.
Swimmer!
I’m just about to shove off on my run as Hazel’s raft slides sideways over the drop. Suddenly Tom Martin is blowing his whistle and starting to row the Gem toward the rapid, and people are saying Hazel is in the water. I’m already in position in the currrent, so after pausing to make sure my heaving line is ready, I start to row toward the rapid entrance ahead of Tom.
“You need to be further right, amigo,” he shouts to me, and I start pulling harder across the current.
And then I’m almost there. I can see the pourover where Hazel went over, directly in front of me–definitely something to avoid. The narrow tongue on the left is there, I can see it, I know I can probably make it with a few hard strokes back left–but I don’t want to miss and put another person in the water. One is bad enough. So with very little time left to think about it, I pull hard right instead, anything to avoid the pourover.
The right tongue is broad and inviting and seems like the obvious line–except that it sets you up for a run down the rocky and hole-filled right side of the rapid, with no chance to get into the Duck Pond. But I’m only worrying about staying upright so that I have a chance to pull Hazel in if I can reach her. At about 47 degrees Fahrenheit, the water of the Colorado is too cold to last long in, especially dressed in shorts and a T-shirt. And there are plenty of other hazards: rocks, holes, undertows, who knows what. And so I’m off down the right side, knowing that I might have the first chance to pull Hazel in, and hoping not to screw it up if I do reach her.
As I come out of the first waves after the initial drop, I look ahead and see Hazel’s raft ahead about halfway through Hance Rapid. There are TWO people aboard again. Somehow Hazel is back in her raft and already working at the oars. Between waves I turn back toward Tom Martin, racing through the rapid behind me, to give the OK sign (pat the top of your head with one hand) and point toward Hazel’s raft over and over, hoping he sees me.
The rest of the run through Hance, for me at least, is a test of luck rather than skill. Or maybe a test of how idiot-proof an eighteen-foot rubber raft fully loaded with gear really is. It’s a big heavy boat that seems like it can punch through most holes and waves–as long as you hit them straight. And somehow I do, despite being thrown off my seat by one wave, and losing my grip on my left oar in another. Then I’m at the bottom of the rapid with the giant hole in front of me.
Again, not much time to think. I take a feeble pull sideways above the hole, hoping to miss it on the left side as the original plan called for. But my half-hearted attempt shows me that I’ve come through the rapid too far on the right to make that work. I have a few seconds to make my next choice: straighten out the raft and punch directly through the hole, hoping not to stall out on top of the wave and flip; or pull two hard strokes back toward river right instead, and hope there’s time to miss the hole on the right side. If I don’t, that’ll mean going through sideways. And that will mean coming out at the bottom upside-down.
I pull hard to river right. One stroke. Two. And then there’s just time to mostly straighten out the raft and I’m sliding by the right side of the hole, safe. Hazel and Pam are up ahead, already eddied out of the rapid on river right waiting for me.
It’s clear that even an experienced boatman can have trouble. Hazel had gone into the rapid calmly, thinking she was pretty much on line.
“I hadn’t realized there was such a big drop on the other side of the rock or I definitely would’ve cranked harder,” she tells me later. Instead, she was thrown from the boat, which ran over her (luckily the water was deep enough or it might have pinned her to the river bottom).
Her passenger, Pam Mortenson, was facing forward when they went over the drop. “The thing hit me, and I turned around to say ‘Wow, that was a good one!’ and she’s gone!” Pam Mortenson says. She rode through most of the rapid alone, in a raft with no one at the oars. Meanwhile Hazel was trying to keep track of the boat’s position as she floated downstream. She wasn’t worried.
“I’ve swum several times before, but that’s the longest swim I had,” Hazel says. “You don’t have time to think about it, you just get on with it. The water didn’t feel cold at all. Didn’t lose my shoes.”
As the raft passed over her at the top of the rapid, Hazel managed to grab the flip line and hang on, but the raft spun away in another wave, leaving her alone in the water. She was able to turn into another wave and swim up it to the top, where she had a moment with her head well above the water.
“I had enough time to turn around and look back,” she says, “and I saw the boat about twenty feet away, over my left shoulder. I tumbled again, and I came up and the boat was right next to me.”
She managed to grab the raft again and, with Pam Mortenson hauling on her life jacket, was able to climb aboard. They hit one more big wave–hit it straight, luckily–and then Hazel was back at the oars.
“There was one rock ahead of us when I got to the oars, about six inches under the water, and I KNOW I’m not sticking to that rock,” Hazel says.
No way, no adding insult to injury. A few hard pulls and they were past the rock, safely in the tail waves of the rapid. Altogether, Hazel was in the water for maybe twenty seconds.
I ask her how long she was held down. A few seconds at a time, she says.
“It was more the turbulence, just the fact that I was getting rolled over. Because I was worried about being Maytagged.”
Getting Maytagged is what boatmen call getting caught in a keeper hole, one that holds you underwater and rolls you around and around in one place like a front-loading washing machine. Getting Maytagged drowns people. Hazel was lucky; we’ve all been lucky.
I ask Tom Martin how worried he was, with his wife in the water at the top of Hance Rapid.
He pauses to think. “The short answer? Very,” he says. “A swim at the top of Hance is typically fatal.”
Tom would know; he’s been keeping records of Canyon accidents and fatalities for years, there has been many boat accidents in the lake, many families have had to hire a boat accident lawyer due to all the injuries that were caused from these accidents.
Clear Creek Canyon
It’s a big day for rapids: a mile and a half after Hance comes Sockdolager Rapid (a 7), and Grapevine (another 7) two miles after that. Sockdolager and Grapevine, though, are much more straightforward. Big waves–far bigger than anything I ever hope to encounter in my sail-and-oar boat–but pretty much a straight run through each one.
With Sockdolager and Grapevine, we’re into the inner gorge of Grand Canyon. Here giant angled fins of black rock drop directly into the river on both sides. It’s a dark narrow stretch known as Upper Granite Gorge. The black rock is Vishnu Schist, some of the oldest exposed rock on earth, shot through with veins of pink granite and quartz. We camp at a small beach at the base of the black cliffs, just upstream of Clear Creek Canyon.
It’s my day off, so I have no camp duties. Instead I join Tom Martin and Ian McCluskey for a steep scramble over a ridge of Vishnu Shist. The ridge separates our camp from Clear Creek Canyon, where we can get water (the Colorado is so silty it clogs filters unless you let the sand settle out overnight). We drag two empty six-gallon water cans and a gravity-fed filter up the ridge and down the other side.
Then it’s back to camp with the full jugs, ninety-five pounds of water. Tomorrow we’ll hit Phantom Ranch, at the base of the popular Bright Angel Trail. Civilization.
“You’re going to meet people who’ve had a shower in the last day,” Hazel says. “And they’re going to look at you and say ‘You’re one of those rough tough rivermen.’ You have to walk with the appropriate swagger.”
With her swim and self-rescue in Hance Rapid, Hazel has probably earned more of the swagger than the rest of us.
NOTE:
All historical photos in this blog are provided courtesy of Historic River Boats Afloat. All rights to these photos are retained; please do not re-use or re-post them without permission.

An easy day on the river, about eight miles from our camp at Tanner Rapid to tonight’s camp just above the much bigger Hance Rapid. Tom Martin’s guidebook rates Hance an 8 out of 10, the biggest rapid we’ve come to so far — a thirty-foot drop in about 1/6 of a mile. And we’ll be camping right at the lip, with the rapid roaring through our dreams all night. My dreams anyway.

Along the way to our camp at Hance, Greg Hatten and Randy Dersham let me row their replica boats, the Portola and the Susie Too.

The Damnation of a River–Almost

In a lot of ways, Greg and Randy’s boats are the heart of this trip, since boats is something all people like and that’s why they decide to even rent yacht for trips, since you can Visit the https://yachttraininginasia.com/ Website to find the right services for this. This year marks the 50th anniversary of the original boats’ launch. More importantly, the Portola and the Susie Too were used by the Sierra Club to document
Grand Canyon in the early 1960s, just before the gates of Glen Canyon Dam were closed. The photos from those trips
were compiled in a book called Time and the River Flowing. The story is that when Congress and the Senate were
voting on the installation of a series of dams and waterworks in Grand Canyon (but outside the 1960s Park
boundaries), every legislator in Washington found a copy of Time and the River Flowing in his mailbox. Funding
for the dams was rejected, and the boundaries of Grand Canyon National Park were expanded to include the
proposed dam sites.

Marble Canyon Dam, Diamond Creek Dam, Bridge Canyon Dam, a water diversion tunnel from Marble Canyon Dam to Kanab
canyon–such extreme development would have radically changed Grand Canyon. Tom Martin kneels down with a stick in hand and draws a few squiggly lines in the sand. “So here’s a rough map
of the canyon,” he says, pausing to revise the twists and turns at the western end of the Park. “They were
gonna put a dam here and build a tunnel out to Kanab Canyon,” he explains, drawing a line from the proposed
Marble Canyon Dam site below Lee’s Ferry to Kanab Canyon, which even after even days we haven’t reached yet.
The line Tom draws to represent the tunnel is a clean straight line, a human line, that slices well north of
the Colorado Rivers sinuous curves.

Basically, they were going to leave Grand Canyon National Park “untouched”–except for taking all the water.

“And everything above the dam, you know, from Lee’s Ferry, would have been a lake,” Tom Martin says.

I ask Tom Martin what Hance Rapid, roaring along like a windstorm just below our camp, would look like now if
the dams had gone in.

“We wouldn’t be on a lake, but we would be on much less water than this,” Tom tells me. “All this water would
be used for electric production, and there would be maybe 1,000 cubic feet per second here, at minimum flow.”

Tomorrow when we run Hance Rapid, we’ll be at fairly low water: between 7,000 and 13,000 cubic feet per second.

The Boats

Keith Steele, who built the original Portola and Susie Too, was a boat builder who specialized in MacKenzie River
drift boats–a type still widely used throughout the world for access to whitewater rivers. Pat Reilly and Martin
Litton each ordered a boat from Steele. The Litton and Reilly boats–the Portola and the Susie Too–are not true
MacKenzie River drift boats, but they share many similarities.

Greg Hatten, who built the replica Portola, is a MacKenzie River guide, rowing Grand Canyon for the first time
on this trip. When I ask him about the differences between the Portola and a true MacKenzie River boat, he
sketches two profile hull views in his journal. One is banana-shaped, the other a mostly flat-bottomed boat
with upturned ends.

“A typical MacKenzie River boat is a 16 footer,” Greg says. “It’s 48 inches wide. The ones we’re running [the
Portola and the Susie R] are 52-54 inches wide, and they come out at just over 16 feet.” He brings the journal
over to let me have a closer look at his quick sketch. “The biggest difference is the flat spot,” he says.
“Most MacKenize River boats have a continuous rocker–” he taps the banana-shaped sketch, “and these boats
have an enormous flat spot, like that–” he taps the flat-bottomed profile, “which helps them track better.”

Of course, the huge buoyancy chambers fore and aft, and the sealed seats, are another difference–one that
makes these boats a sane ride in Grand Canyon whitewater.Greg Hatten and Randy Dersham built the two replica
hulls together over two weekends last summer in Randy’s boat shop (he builds MacKenzie River drift boats in
Nimrod, Oregon, just ten miles from Keith Steele’s 1960s shop). Then each took a hull home to finish it. The
Portola has the red-white-and-blue Harper Goff paint scheme shared by all of Pat Reilly’s boats, while the
Susie Too is white with a teal sheer stripe (the stripe was later re-painted red; Martin Litton apparently
hated the teal).

The hulls are 1/4″ plywood, with a 1/2″ bottom and 3/8″ horizontal surfaces–decks, seats, etc. What kind
of plywood, I ask Randy. Meranti?

“No, they’re all fir,” he says. “We bitched about it every step of the way.” Although Greg and Randy wanted to use fir to match the original boats, marine fir plywood is not what it
used to be. The football-shaped patches kept popping off the panels as they bent the sides on, needing a
lot of filling and fairing. But the job got done, and done well. The Ride

So today I got to row both the Portola and the Susie Too. After rowing Fat George (a better name for my
raft than Georgie, I’ve decided), the nine-foot oars in Greg and Randy’s boats feel like toys. And in a
raft I’m perched high atop a gargantuan cooler. In Greg and Randy’s boats I’m so low to the water I feel
like I’m paddling with my hands.

It’s a FAR better experience in the hard boats, like moving from an overloaded garbage scow to an elegant
Whitehall. Except that the Portola and Susie Too turn on a dime and give you fifteen cents change, which
no Whitehall could match. One stroke of an oar is enough to spin me around 180 degrees in the current.
It’s so much fun that after I ride through Unkar Rapid (a 6) on my fat raft, I run back upstream to ride
through again in the Portola with Greg Hatten and his other passenger, Pam Mortenson.

Unlike the heavy rafts, the Portola is alive in the water, leaping high over the waves even with three
people aboard. Greg steers a line through the long rapid (one of the longest in the Canyon, maybe 1/4 mile
long) dodging holes and porpoising over big standing waves. At one point the bottom hits a hidden rock in
the trough of a wave, and apart from a dull thud, there’s no problem–the Portola just keeps driving on.

Later I get to row Randy’s Susie Too through a couple of smaller riffles, with Dave Mortenson as my
passenger. A few days back the oak pad at the base of one oarlock split–whitewater puts tremendous
leverage on nine-foot oars–and Randy eventully sawed off the pad flush with the gunwale on that side
to fix it, reinforcing the new lower oarlock with fiberglass. There’s a difference in feel between the
two oars after Randy’s surgery, but not one that seems to matter much. Again, the boat is like a live
thing, fast and nimble. Despite being a bit nervous–no one wants to ding someone else’s boat–we come
through unscathed. Not only unscathed, but already thinking about what my wife would think of another
boat in our garage, something like a drift boat, maybe…

I guess I should finish the boat I’m working on now first. But if I come back to run Grand Canyon
again–make that when–I’ll be in a hard boat if I can. I ask Randy what he thinks of the Susie Too,
since he knows this kind of boat a lot better than I do.

“It is made for this river,” he tells me. “I rowed it down the Rogue river and it felt too big and
too heavy. But it’s a healthy size for this river.” The Rogue is smaller; though it’s much more
technical and rocky, it typically runs anywhere from 2,000 to 8,000 cubic feet per second. “Very definitely it’s big big water here,” Randy says. “7,000 and 13,000 right now–and that’s low water.”

Tomorrow morning, first thing, the Portola and the Susie Too will see their biggest rapid yet–a rapid
that would be nothing more than a rocky trickle today if David Brower, the Sierra Club, and a whole
community of river rats had not collaborated on a book designed to show Congress the colossal mistake
they were about to make.

Looking down the rocky jaws of Hance Rapid, knowing that I’ll be taking my raft through tomorrow morning, I’m still grateful. Incredibly grateful. I just hope I don’t end up swimming.