Grand Canyon Rafting

Colorado River Rafting

By Kerrick James

GRAND CANYON, Arizona - Perched on the bright blue tip of the pontoon, I try to remember how Craig Lutke told me to clutch the ropes in a big rapid while simultaneously looking expertly nonchalant in front of my loving wife and dubious sons.

Just ahead rumbles House Rock Rapids-a mere low-water 7 on a scale of 10-but still the first substantial froth in our six-day Grand Canyon odyssey down the planet’s oldest rocks and biggest rapids. My wife, Elissa, having overcome grave misgivings, sits in the relatively stable middle section of the six-pontoon Western River Expeditions raft. One pontoon over from me sits my older brother Dave, a workaholic lawyer still silently stewing about the stack of contracts and legal wrangles left back in the real world. But my worries at the moment are Noah and Caleb, our grown, college student sons.

My paternal aura has dimmed of late, although it was I who taught them to swim when they were but grins and fidgets-encouraging, nurturing and calling out when they sputtered to the surface, “Remember, drink the water, breathe the air.” But they were babies then and I was very tall. Now, they’re taller and stronger. So all I have left to impress them is expertise and experience.

Except I can’t remember how Lutke, the charming, wisecracking Greek god of a boatman, told me to hang onto the ropes lashed across the pontoon as the raft sluices into what suddenly looks like the churning, boiling, spouting, sucking, whirling, fuming end of the world in the bottom of a mile-deep canyon infamous for drownings and heatstroke.

So the raft drops into a the rapid, plunges into a hole, climbs up the other side and assaults a whirling wall of 50-degree water, throwing me back hard against the rope. I hang on, while the raft struggles out of the trough and plunges straight down into another furious, ice blue depression straining to swallow us whole. We smash through and the water smacks into the faces of we fools on the front, wrenching loose my grip. I still have my backhand anchored, but now the raft climbs again, so that the pontoons bend at the center frame, tilting us all back at a 45-degree angle.

I tumble backward in a great wash of water, feet straight up in the air, my backhand grip wrenched loose by the roll. Someone grabs me before the water can knock me off the raft as we plunge out of House Rock Rapids. I lie on my drowned-rat back in a tangle of legs as everyone yells and hollers and whoops in the unmatched rush of a big rapid. Looking up I see, Jim Illg, who earned his masters in geography before signing on as a Western River Expeditions swamper, all primed to dive in and save me. Caleb and Noah each clutch a handful of my shirt. They looked concerned, but maybe that’s just from the strain of not laughing.

“You okay?” asks Illg.

“Oh, yeah,” I say, abashed.

“Gave ‘em all a good look at your shoe size,” says Lutke from the back of the boat, where he went through the rapid standing up.

Everyone laughs.

Noah leans forward, his face sympathetic. “Remember, Dad. Drink the water. Breathe the air.”

So much for the majesty of fatherhood. They had outgrown me.

So we went down into the Grand Canyon, down to the river, down into the earth, down to the beginning of things for our new beginnings built on all the old memories-as the Canyon was built of shale and sandstone and limestone with names like Tapeats and Mauv and Redwall and Supai and Hermits and Coconino and Kaibab, then cut and torn and sculpted and smoothed into something sublime and enduring.

The Canyon takes measure of any person who ventures into it, including the ancestral Puebloans who farmed its meandering terraces, the 35,000 people a year who swing jauntily down a hiking trail to camp overnight and then toil wearily back out, the 20,000 people who fish and sightsee on the 15-mile stretch of quiet water between Glen Canyon Dam and Lee’s Ferry, the 23,000 people who climb apprehensively onto a raft or a dory to run varying lengths of the winding miles of gulps and grandeur, and even the 4 million or so people who arrive yearly to gaze from the incomprehensible edge of this mile-deep gash in the earth.

The Canyon portion of the river drops some 2,000 feet in 277 miles of twists and turns, not so great a fall except that it is concentrated in the major rapids, punctuating the drift through splendor with a spattering of fear and joy where a tributary has dumped a load of boulders. These rapids funnel the river into a drop of 8 to 15 feet, a white-water fury whose real power only the grinning boatmen comprehend.

I studied the books and river guides, trying to comprehend the spectacle of the Canyon’s creation. The earliest drainage system on the slopes of the Rocky Mountains, ancestors of the present-day Colorado River system, date back just 60 million years when the Colorado Plateau rose in the collision between crustal plates. The river cut down through the layers, removing perhaps 10,000 to 20,000 feet of overlying sediment and eventually exposing the oldest rocks in the Canyon-the 1.84 billion-year-old rock called Elves Chasm gniess in the, dark, deep rapids-plagued heart of the Canyon.

Geologists still debate the origins of the present river, which runs from the Rocky Mountains to the Gulf of California and drains chunks of seven states. The present river may be only 6 million years old, cobbled together from the captured drainage of several older rivers.

The river has chewed into the uplifting earth at astonishing speed, thanks to its enormous flood flows. The flow of the river prior to damming, varied from spring floods running at 60,000 to 100,000 cubic feet per second (cfs) to low summer flows of 1,000 to 3,000 cfs. Historically, floods 0f 200,000 to 300,000 cfs have been recorded, and in the distant past there is some evidence of 400,000 cfs.

Hoover and Glen canyon dams, which bookend the Grand Canyon, have changed everything. While the annual flow remains about the same as the pre-dam river, it is now managed so that high flows are around 20,000 to 25,000 cfs and low flows around 5,000 to 8,000 cfs. During the high-water year of 1983, however, the flow peaked at 92,000 cfs, which nearly washed away Glen Canyon Dam. Lake Powell eliminated the naturally occurring floods but annually traps an estimated 100 million tons of sediment, which has transformed the once warm, muddy river into a clear, cold 50-degree trout stream.

The dam brought complex changes. It severely impacted the eight species of native fish, but benefited trout; protected river runners from floods, but eroded the beaches where they like to camp and made the rapids worse for lack of floods that move boulders at the mouths of tributaries; washed away native plant and animal species, but enabled other plants to gain a roothold on the formerly flood-secured shoreline.

For instance, Crystal-one of three class 10 rapids on the river-is the result of a recent debris flow on one of the tributaries at river mile 98. Crystal caused three deaths on pontoon commercial river trips when floods on the tributaries turned it into a raft-flipping monster that overturned even the giant commercial rafts.

But Lutke assures us we are running at a placid 10,000 cfs and should have no trouble navigating Crystal, so long as we hang onto the rope and “suck rubber” by leaning flat against the pontoon as the waves wash over us.

Still, after my debacle in House Rock Rapids, Crystal worries me. As a responsible father, perhaps I should insist my boys sit with me in the center section colorfully nicknamed the “chicken coop.” But knowing Crystal lies two days ahead, I put the matter out of my head through a succession of lesser rapids as we drift past a heap of wonders while the river works its magic on our little group, heating and cooling and smoothing and sculpting.

We glide down the river past the inscription on the rock where a would –be railroad builder drowned for lack of a life jacket in 1889; past Stanton’s cave with it’s 40,000-year old driftwood and bones of long extinct birds; past Vaseys Paradise, where a river gushes from the cliff to nurture a riot of poison ivy; past Redwall Cavern, a big enough to seat a symphony orchestra and it’s audience; past the Anasazi Bridge on a cliff face and 1,000-year-old granaries at Nankoweap; past the blue-green Little Colorado River with its playful waterchute rapids; past the enchanted waterfall of Elves Chasm; past a pensive banjo player in the echoes of a fluted side canyon; past the 150-foot Deer Creek waterfall that makes its own wind; past the turquoise waters of Havasu Creek; past bighorn sheep and deer and lizards and eagles and peregrine falcons and condors and darting schools of trout.

Confined to the raft and the cliff-hedged campsites, the 17 people aboard fall easily into intimacy and affection. The woman mourning her husband, the breast cancer survivors giddy with life, the adventurer, the painter, the poet, the businessman and the empty-nesters all seek the surcease and succor of the surrounding river and the rocks older than human sorrow. We give ourselves to the river, which changes every instant and not at all-both enduring and ephemeral, like life, like love.

I also see change in Elissa, who has never camped and who eyes rapids with great foreboding. She works her way up to the front seat, topples over in Upset Rapids, comes up laughing and sleeps easily under the stars, wheeling through the glowing band of the Milky Way.

I see it in Dave, who opens up more day by day to the Canyon, and the companionship, hiking to hidden waterfalls, and by the last day is laughing on the tip of the foremost pontoon surrounded by a group of women.

I see it in Caleb, whose quick-witted impersonations of Arnold Schwarzenegger charm the whole boat. People call out from the back of the raft, hoping to lure “ Arnold” out for some hilarious commentary.

I see it in Noah, who loves the deep, ancient core of the Canyon-the river-fluted Vishnu Schist, the metamorphosed metaphor for time and the forged earth on which we perch, a thin film of dreams and hope.

So by the time we come to Crystal, we are all arrayed on the foremost pontoons with nervous smiles and white knuckles. As Noah snugs into position next to me, I notice that he grips the rope in front with his palm up instead of palm down.

So I change my grip as we slide toward the monster’s maw, chanting like druids in a thunderstorm-bearded, battered and brimming with fear and joy. We plunge and roar and scream and laugh as the raft smashes and rolls and climbs and crashes. With a palm up grip, I cling like a barnacle and watch my sons from the corner of my eye in a heart-stopping, stop action of splash and fury.

Then we are floating in the incongruous calm below the rapid as Lutke hops upon top of the load-proud as a father at a swimming lesson-to announce that we have graduated into the elite ABC Club-“Alive Below Crystal.”

We all laugh and high-five, utterly and unambiguously alive. And I have learned a few things, including the proper grip for a class 10 rapid. My son taught me.

Peter Aleshire of Phoenix says he sometimes still wakes up in the middle if the night and mistakes the whir of the fan for the sound of the river.
Kerrick James of Mesa says that rafting the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon for the sixth time is like rereading a favorite piece of great literature. More is revealed and understood, and it becomes a living part of you.

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