Photo credit (various pictures in this Grand Canyon series of posts) to David Bogle, Robyn Cantor, Art and Jillian Cook, Cathy Cox, Sheila Reiter, Leslie Reuter, Steffen Saustrup, and Sheila Torres-Blank
Time for some Grand Canyon river rafting stories! We spent 3 amazing weeks on the Colorado River in September-October with 18 amazing friends. It was a heck of an experience and there were a heck of a lot of photos taken. I've finally got them narrowed down to several sets so it's time to write a few posts.
The short version: Amazing scenery! Unplugged for 20 days. Joyful company and lots of laughs. Scary rapids. We all survived. And I didn't fall out of the raft. John is awesome.
The long version: Well, the good news is that my memory doesn't hold a blow-by-blow account of those 3 weeks. So this should just be a bunch of pictures with a sprinkle of writing, a few river days at a time.
A bit of history: John first applied to run a private Grand Canyon trip in 1996 (!). Initially he was on a waiting list. Then the system switched to a lottery. His waiting list status gained him extra lottery tickets, but every year we chose the most optimal and highly-sought-after launch dates. No luck for years.
Until the park service, in an effort to assist the original wait list people, offered him a one-time deal. Select any launch date in the following 5 years and you're good to go. What a deal! Luckily we weren't quite ready for a 2020 launch, and 2021 was much easier to plan for.
We were so happy to have a bunch of adventure racing friends who wanted to join us, plus some new friends from the Austin paddling community. Eventually we filled the 16 slots, including 4 people who hiked out partway and another 4 who hiked in to take their places.
Our river expert, Mark, has been helping us for years in preparing for this trip. He has been down the Grand over 20 times and was extremely important in making our trip a success. A couple others in our group had been down once or twice. The rest of us were complete newbies. As the park ranger at Lee's Ferry sardonically put it, "well, good luck!"
Mark suggested going through a Flagstaff outfitter for our rafts, gear, and food, and we were very happy to work with PRO (Professional River Outfitters). They made everything easy to plan, took care of lots of little details, and provided super delicious food. All we had to do was get ourselves and our camping gear to Flagstaff.
Oh, and someone had to row the rafts. John, Jeff, Jimmy, and Charlie all had river paddling experience but not a lot of rafting time. A training class in Colorado was helpful. Mark trained people as we went, and he kept saying that this river has big rapids but nothing too dangerous - it might roll you around a bit if you went in, but it would spit you out eventually. Hmm, that's great for water lovers; not so ideal for someone like me who has a healthy (and perhaps a little irrational) fear of water. There was plenty of trepidation in our raft.
But hey, the rest of the trip sounded incredible!
To get us started, here are a few pre-trip pictures leading up to our launch.
Loading up in the PRO van, about to start the drive to Lee's Ferry:
It doesn't rain much in Arizona outside the summer monsoon season, but we managed to pick a rig day with an afternoon storm. I guess it's good to find out early whether your clothing can handle a little water. We unloaded our gear and Beth with PRO started organizing us for the raft setup:
Raft inflation, mostly using a generator-powered pump, supplemented with a hand pump to move things along:
Rainbow! Must be good luck.
Rather dramatic lighting as the sun found a spot below the dark clouds:
I started writing haikus again, as a way to remember a few things about each day. Rig Day haiku:
Unexpected storm
Figure out where to put stuff
It's dark already
Camping out the night before launch - I guess we're almost ready!
Launch day dawned bright and clear. And one of our group took a really nice picture of the rafts that were ready for loading:
First we had a couple briefings, one with the aforementioned park ranger and another with Beth. Both were packed with useful information that we mostly kind of absorbed.
Beth went through the PRO menu and information binder that would soon become a permanent attachment to my body (at least when we weren't on the water - can't risk getting it wet!):
Gear loading amid running around trying to sort last-minute details like compiling our "sweep kits" (in case we needed to pull a raft off a rock, thankfully never used) and figuring out how to pack our SodaStream carbonator (yes, a luxury, but several of us really appreciated it).
Robyn, Cathy, and I latched ourselves onto John's raft in the hopes that he knew best what he was doing; or at least had the most luck while doing it.
Then it was "go time" - so as soon as I figure out in what order to upload the first set of photos, we'll get this show on the river!
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