National Treasure Offers Adventure

This is white water rafting made easy, but not without excitement.
By Jeff Davis

We dash down from the falls to the rafts in the rain, slipping on wet rocks and sinking ankle-deep in damp sand. All the clothing we laid out to dry has been rained on. The rain drives harder as we clamber onto the 18-passenger rafts and pull on rain gear for the biggest rapids of our 100-mile Grand Canyon rafting trip

Now we are pelted with sleet-like hail. A silent flash of lightning bleaches the Canyon walls for a millisecond. Andy Schmutz, our trip leader and a 10-year-veteran of the rapids, looks up from tinkering with his outboard motor in the back of the raft.

"Was that lightning?" he asks in surprise. His answer is a chorus of "yes" and "yup" from us, followed immediately by a boom overhead. "Well, that's thunder," he says to himself in disbelief.

Several river-riders ask him if it is safe to be on the raft, on the river, in a lightning storm. "Lightning never strikes the bottom of the Canyon," he said. "Too many other tall things to hit," adds Reno Whited, Schmutz's swamper/apprentice, just beginning his second year on the river.

I wonder if both river men have mentally crossed their fingers. We enter the main current of the river backwards to turn downriver for our shot at a series of four big rapids. Another flash of lightning illuminates our excited wet faces and our brightly colored wet raingear. "Anybody can do this on a sunny day," shouts Patty Culler of Livingston, Texas, making the trip with husband, Tom. There are smiles and nods of agreement.

The rain slows and the rapids are almost upon us, a level "six," an "eight," two more "sixes." Reno climbs down to ride the rapids at the left forward point, a gutsy position - the surging river is icy cold and the April day has been windy and overcast.

Afraid I won't forgive myself later if I don't maximize my fun - and fear - I utter a short expletive under my breath and climb down to the right forward point. Seven of us now ride the low front of the raft and we slide into the first set of rapids, dipping and rising on a roller coaster of water.

This is not the Guadalupe, I think to myself, as an icy wave comes over the front of the raft and into my lap. But it's OK. We all hang on, screaming and whopping, cold water in our faces and through our clothing. The raft carries us through the surf-like gauntlet. The level "eight" rapid seems no bigger than the "six," now that we are veterans of the waves.

Reno spots a peregrine falcon high along the south wall of the canyon as we float between the third and fourth sets of rapids, and we watch it circle and turn among the cliffs. Perhaps it is wondering why we're making so much noise in its quiet canyon.

This is white water rafting made easy, the Cadillac" trip if you will. Patty calls it "the Grand Canyon with training wheels."

I took the three-day Lower Canyon exploration with Western River Expeditions, a top-notch provider of canyon experiences. Even your grandmother would enjoy this one. The guides do almost everything for you. You just hang on all day, set up your tent in the late afternoon and rinse your own supper dish. They run the motor and steer the raft. They prepare the lunch and cook the amazingly delicious supper. They clean up after supper and start the "campfire" in a metal firebox.

They set up and take down the portable latrines. Reno even pulled out his guitar on the second night, played some original compositions and led us in a couple of off-key late '60's sing-alongs.

There were some surprises. I expected three days of white-water rafting and camaraderie in the rugged, majestic beauty of the canyon. What I didn't expect was the logistical variety involved in getting us to the rafts and later from the rafts back to civilization.

From the Las Vegas airport - where my Western River Expeditions trip began and ended - and back to that airport, I rode in and on seven kinds of conveyances.

• A shuttle bus took us from the airport gate around the flightline to the general-aviation side of the airport.
• A commuter plane flew us over Hoover Dam and Lake Mead into Arizona to an isolated airstrip near the rim of the Grand Canyon.
• A van took us from the airstrip u a gravel road to the cabin of the Bar 10 Ranch.
• A helicopter flew us from the cabin over the North Rim and down between the canyon walls to a rocky spot near the south bank of the Colorado River.
• A pair of wonderful 18-person J-Rig rubber rafts floated us about 100 mile down the river over three days.
• And an air-conditioned charter bus carried us over Hoover Dam and back to the Las Vegas airport.

Of them all, of course, the rafts were sublime. But the 12-minute helicopter ride was thrilling. We took off in a 45-mph wind; we bank-turned within the canyon walls and landed on a rocky point near the rafts.

Another surprise? Half an hour before our final supper on the river, while we were setting up our tents at Gneiss Camp, Andy and Reno, dressed in bow ties, came around with cold shrimp cocktail complete with lettuce and spicy sauce.

Another surprise? Wildlife. Lizards, up to 10 different species, could be seen at almost every stop. The side trips. Hiking up into twisted, hidden canyons to look at Indian artifacts or waterfalls, were exactly the break we needed from our river conquest.

The geological information available from the river men was astounding - 400 million-year-old Vishnu shist alongside 1-million-year-old lava flows.

Oh, by the way, look for a television production on the canyon within the year - singer James Taylor and a full video-production crew were on an 18-day rowing trip just 24 hours behind us, we were told.