There will, I’m sure, be many more photos from the trip available as people make their way home and post them. But for now, here’s a look back at some of the events, people, and places mentioned in the blog. A fitting end, I hope—after all, a picture is worth a thousand words.

Thanks for reading along, and for all your comments. I hope you enjoyed following our journey. Now go get a river permit and do it yourself.

–Tom Pamperin, Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin

And finally, courtesy of Kristen Burkholder, who joined us from Diamond Creek, a musical look at the trip:

The HistoricBoatsAfloat Song

(with apologies to Gilbert and Sullivan)

They are the very model of a modern river running crew

Collecting photos, measurements and stories of the boating few

Who ran the river early on and put in before ‘sixty two

They built the boats themselves and then they painted them all red and blue

Granite, Crystal, Lava, swimmers laughing through the maelstrom

Through all the scouting yet one more has joined the Left at Bedrock club

Yoshie, Tom and HazelTom, Norm, Pam, Elmira in the tub

And Power Station, now members of Colorado Swimming Club

Up and down the beach they trudge, crew hauling gear at every stop

The cameras recreate old photos, filming every flip and flop

They built the boats themselves and then they painted them all red and blue

They are the very model of a modern river running crew!

(Original lyrics at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_General’s_Song)

Craig Wolfson lounges on a boulder beside the amazing turquoise waters of the Little Colorado River. Another tough day.

Norm Takasugawa, sweep boat and keeper of the condor cage. And the 462 pounds of M&M’s.

Greg Hatten (rowing) and Dave Mortenson in the replica Portola. You can’t see the booze or lollipops from here, but trust me—they’re aboard somewhere.

Randy Dersham and his hat being filmed by videographer Ian McCluskey aboard the replica Susie Too, sister ship to the Portola.

The ever-cheerful Yoshie Kobayashi rowing the Hyde on the mud-brown waters of the Colorado River.

Crystal Elliot brings a fashion sense and cleanliness to river running that borders on the unacceptable as she rows the Hyde on a flat stretch, edging past Norm Takasugawa in the sweep boat.

The group at Hotauta, our last night with Crystal and Randy. From left to right, standing: Dave Mortenson, Pam Wolfson, Ian McCluskey, Leif Mortenson, David Perez, Crystal Elliot, Tom Pamperin, Greg Hatten.

Left to right, seated: Pam Mortenson, Natalie Mortenson, Craig Wolfson, Hazel Clark, Yoshie Kobayashi, Tom Martin, Norm Takasugawa, Randy Dersham and his hat.

(Tom Martin photo)

David Perez about to take the leap into the icy waters of Elves’ Chasm. Is it a coincidence that the only one of us to make this jump was also the only one to run a raft through a big hole on purpose?

Tom Pamperin contemplates his descent strategy high up in the frog ponds of Forster Canyon Narrows, with nightfall not far away and his flashlight waiting in his tent.

Tom Pamperin asks himself—yet again—“How the hell did I get up here?” during his Forster Canyon hike.

Natalie Mortenson, Cece Mortenson, and Richard Carrier heading out on their Deer Creek-Thunder River-Tapeats Creek loop hike, with a can of coconut juice, a few sandwiches, and 8,364 games of “I Spy” in their near future.

Natalie, Cece, and Richard in the amazing Deer Creek Canyon, nearing the patio. The narrow slot to their right is a hundred feet deep, and narrow enough to jump across if you’re stupid enough to try.

Cece and Natalie Mortenson about to begin the long hot descent into the Tapeats Creek drainage near Thunder River. Not quite halfway done with the loop; more than halfway out of steam.

The replica Gem, Flavell, and Susie R in the amazing turquoise waters of Havasu Creek.

Tom Martin rows the replica Gem he built in 2009–the tallest guy on the trip in the littlest boat. He has done four Canyon runs in the Gem—so far…

Tom Pamperin scouts Lava falls in his new river hat, getting ready to earn his Colorado Swim Club T-shirt.

Leif Mortenson rows his mother Pam in the replica Flavell, both of them ready for action.

(Tom Martin photo)

Tom Pamperin searches for optimal rowing efficiency as Ian McCluskey works hard on bow watch aboard the Fat George.

(Tom Martin photo)

Craig Wolfson rows his wife Pam in the Susie R. Note the drysuit, which Pam elected to stop wearing shortly before running Killer Fang Falls with Norm. Not her best decision. (Tom Martin photo)

Richard Carrier , Chilean Frenchman fantastique,  rows the Susie Too on a stretch of flat water.

(Tom Martin photo)

David Perez takes on the hole at 209-Mile Rapid, and the hole wins. (Tom Martin photo)

Norm Takasugawa shows Pam Wolfson the far right run at Killer Fang Falls, with a brief stop at the Fangs for an up-close inspection. (Tom Martin photo)

The stars of the show. Left to right: Gem, Susie R, Flavell, Portola, and Susie Too.

(Tom Martin photo)

Leaving the last camp of the trip, just above the take-out at Pearce Ferry. Back to font: Richard Carrier, Helen Howard, Tom Matin, Rich Turner, Kristen Burkholder, Hazel Clark, Tom Pamperin (in hat), David Perez, Pam Wolfson, Yoshie Kobayashi, John West, Norm Takasugawa (hidden behind Ian’s arm), Leif Mortenson, Ian McCluskey, Cece Mortenson,  Dave Mortenson, Natalie Mortenson, Greg Hatten (seated in the Portola), Pam Mortenson

(Tom Martin photo)

The river rats were defined, at least in part, by the things they carried, which varied according to mission and personal
preference. They all carried cam straps–red ones, blue ones, wide black ones–and some of them, like Norm Takasugawa,
seemed to carry more straps than could possibly be necessary and yet Norm used them all and would still ask the boatmen
nearby if they had any extra straps, and would find a way to use them if the answer was yes. The straps weighed 5.6 ounces
each, and the wide ones 9.1 ounces each, and there were straps lashed and girth-hitched and strapped to every corner of
every boat.

And all of them carried dry bags, which weighed somewhere between 11.4 and 56 pounds. They carried their own personal dry
bags, and they carried everyone else’s dry bags, and they carried other dry bags that no one was ever seen to use at any
time on the twenty-four day trip and yet even these bags had to be loaded and strapped and carried up the steep beaches,
and then carried back down the steep beaches and reloaded and strapped down again in the morning.

Some of them carried two six-gallon water cans, which weighed 1.8 pounds when empty and 49.8 pounds when filled with
water, and they carried them up and down steep narrow trails through thick brush to refill them. And David Perez
carried the kitchen box, which weighed enough that carrying it up and down the steep beaches was a two-person job
although on more than one occasion David had been seen carrying the box himself. Three of the boatmen carried aluminum
tables with folding legs. The tables weighed 8.4 pounds each and, like everything else, had to be carried up and down
the steep beaches, not only every morning and evening but one of them, also, at every lunch stop along the way. Roughly
sixteen percent of the river rats’ time was spent carrying tables, although they did not complain about this.

Hazel Clark carried the groover box with its toilet seat and pee bucket seat and soap and hand sanitizer and toilet
paper and rubber gloves and toilet bowl brush and a bottle of powdered Clorox to sprinkle upon groover deposits to
control odor and also the all-important statuette whose absence from the head of the groover trail indicated that
the groover was in use, although sometimes one of them would forget to bring the statuette back with them from the
groover, which caused no end of problems when it occurred. And some of the other boatmen carried boxes of shit and
used toilet paper, although they had originally been filled with wood and bore tape labels that stated: Shitbox Full
of Wood–labels which the boatman carrying the box was well advised to modify to read: Shitbox Full after what was
contained in it was no longer firewood but instead other organic materials.

The baggage boats carried huge coolers filled with block ice and lunch meat and milk and soy milk and mayonnaise and
Grey Poupon and French’s Mustard and Jimmy Dean breakfast sausages with a half-life of 3.8 months. And each boat
carried ammo cans, which weighed anywhere from 6.4 to 37 pounds and were filled with food and trash though with
luck never both at the same time. And other boats carried plastic waterproof containers filled with Tabasco sauce
and green Tabasco sauce and cinnamon and salt and vegetable oil and olive oil and canola oil and paper towels.

Craig Wolfson carried the rescue kit with its carabiners and pulleys and long static lines, which weighed 28.3 pounds
and was what they used to right Norm’s boat after he daringly chose the far right run at Killer Fang Falls, introducing
both himself and his passenger Pam Wolfson to the Colorado River Swim Club. And Pam Wolfson carried a two-piece drysuit
of expensive waterproof material, a suit she wore every single day of the trip. Except the day she flipped in Killer
Fang Falls.

All of them carried toss lines, which the writer used to fish Pam Wolfson out of the river at Killer Fang Falls. And
they carried an extensive vocabulary, much of it profane. And the profanity level went up as the waves got bigger and
the holes got deeper, and went further up as rafts and dories did things their boatmen did not want them to do–things
like going into a big wave sideways, or running the hole at Two Hundred and Nine Mile Rapid and flipping.

Greg Hatten carried lollipops and booze, which weighed a lot but no one ever complained about it. And besides, the load
was lightened rapidly as the trip proceeded. And Tom Martin, Norm Takasugawa, and Greg Hatten carried a disturbing
tendency to sing the morning coffee call and the evening dinner call in four-part harmony that sometimes bordered on
barbershop and other times on insanity. Besides which, Greg Hatten carried also an even more disturbing tendency to
break into song–the song in question being invariably “My Sharona” with lyrics changed to “My Portola,” an infectious
and unbreakable habit he had been introduced to by Ian McCluskey, a never-ending font of obscure songs.

And Ian McCluskey carried ten thousand dollars worth of camera gear and a hip flask filled with single-malt Scotch,
and the lyrics to every song written in the U.S. between 1968 and 1989; and at times he was known to carry two open
cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon at the same time, although later he made the claim that only one of the cans was for himself,
though none of the other river rats stepped forward to claim the second can.

Natalie carried her own lime-green dry bag, which weighed more than she did and was bigger, too, and she carried it
up and down the steep beaches by herself, where she set up her own tent each night (a tent that on one memorable
occasion she even managed to capsize while inside it). And Pam Mortenson carried in her head the location of every
piece of food on the trip, which was a necessity because she was also the only one among them able to decipher the
menus and food location sheets she had prepared for the others so they would not constantly pester her with questions
about why the kale was not on David’s boat where the list said it was, or where the bread rounds for lunch could be
found, or the second bottle of vegetable oil. And she carried the weight of having to answer these same questions
every day as each new cook crew came on duty. We have yet to find the lettuce.

Cece Mortenson carried a boundless enthusiasm for steep long hikes on loose rock, which weighed more heavily upon
her companions than it did upon her. And she carried an ill-advised notion that several rafts lashed together into
one long raft would be faster than a raft by itself. And she carried, too, a hat that more than one bystander
characterized as being reminiscent of a bellhop’s, which seemed odd on someone whose life was a chaotic mess of
mountain guiding in Canada, skiing in Afghanistan, and teaching polar survival in Antarctica for three seasons.

Randy Dersham, when he was still with them, carried a ridiculous hat designed to look like a visor whose spiky
gray-and-white hair perfectly matched Randy’s own hair–so perfectly that it was three days before the writer
realized Randy was wearing a hat. And after Randy left, the hat stayed with them. And Crystal Elliot carried a
helmet which she wore in the rapids and carried also a look of intense focus and even more importantly she carried
the cook crew, which apart from her consisted only of the mostly helpless writer and the equally helpless Dave
Mortenson.

Leif Mortenson carried a bewildering network of cables and motors and cords and volt meters and power strips and
satellite phones and twelve-volt batteries, all of which weighed more than a single person could carry in one
trip although on more than one occasion Leif carried it all and manhandled it into the river where electricity
may or may not have been generated by the river’s flow. And Leif carried, too, his newly earned “Left At Bedrock”
membership and an occasional willingness to crack open a river-chilled PBR before 10:00 a.m. And in camp he carried
an endearing inability to remember whether at any given moment he was speaking in Japanese or English, stopping
himself midstream on more than one occasion to say (usually incorrectly) “I’m sorry, that was in Japanese, wasn’t
it?” and also carried the responsibility for being the only one of the group to be able to solve the
“Truthteller and the Liar” riddle, inventing a completely new and insanely complicated method to do so.

And all of them, once they reached the Hualapai Reservation on or about Day 21, carried a habit of bursting into
Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” whenever a Hualapai tourist helicopter flew by overhead, which happened often, over
and over, transforming the silence of the Canyon with its bubbling waters and twittering wrens into a near-continuous
Airwolf roar for the last few days of the trip.

And they carried, some of them, little tubes of chapstick, which all unbeknownst to them melted to liquid wax in the
day’s heat and poured uselessly onto the sand whenever they were opened. And Dave Mortenson, on the morning of the
last day, carried streaks of lipstick on his feet which appeared there after Dave’s mistaken belief that it was one
of the chapstick tubes he held in his hand.

And they carried Richard Carrier, a token Frenchman and Chilean river rat. And Richard carried an orange Patagonia
jacket which had been a present from his girlfriend, and a outrageously cool French accent and a surprising command
of the nuances of American profanity, although made perhaps inappropriately elegant because of his accent. And he
carried, too, a surprising resemblance to Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride as he rode the big rapids, and yet he rode them all
without flipping or bashing his boat onto the rocks and even mostly managed to keep hold of both oars.

Yoshie carried silence and calm like a quiet evening even in the midst of white watery chaos, and carried, too, an
astounding cleanliness that made her appear that she might, at any moment, be off to play in a polo match, and also
a shy quiet smile and two dry bags at once, each bigger than herself, and at night she carried a need to stand on
the lunch boxes to reach the table for cook crew and supper dishes.

Norm, besides his endless straps, carried 426 pounds of M & Ms and Chewy Chips Ahoy cookies and also a cage on the
back of his raft that contained a baby condor he had constructed from the discarded pelvis of a long-dead desert
creature, with a beak carved of driftwood and stained yellow with French’s mustard, and a few feathers epoxied on.
And he carried, too, a disturbing (especially to his passengers) tendency to choose a run through each rapid that
no one else would run–usually for good reason.

And Dave Mortenson carried with him a bottomless leprechaun’s bag of stories–stories about Republican politics in
Washington state; stories about dramatic leaps from falling boulders onto tall and many-spined barrel cactuses;
stories about masturbating monkeys and Moulty Fulmer; and stories about fires at Nankoweap and long cold hikes in
the Canyon and routes that reach all the way from the river to the rim but are not for the faint of heart; and he
carried a pith helmet with a khaki chin strap which he wore to honor his father, who had run rivers with Moulty
Fulmer and Pat Reilly and other early river rats.

And Craig Wolfson, after Randy was no longer with them, carried the ridiculous hat, and also carried a casual and
lanky rowing style even in the biggest of the big rapids, a slow steady unhurried pulling that always put his boat
on the right line and, frankly, made his runs boring to watch because of their complete lack of drama and a total
absence of “Oh, shit!” moments. He carried, too, an unceasing habit of telling rookie boatmen how they could be
completely fucked up and die in whatever rapid the rookie boatman was currently scouting. “I saw a twenty-two
foot snout boat run this rapid,” he’d say, “with sixteen men on the oars. They hit that lateral wave there, got
surfed into the hole, and got Maytagged around in their until they ran out of food and had to start drawing straws
to see which one of them they would eat next. They never did make it out,” he’d end with, and walk away.

David Perez, besides his red-white-and-blue knit beanie, carried a propensity for eating meat as often as possible,
and in as big a quantity as he could manage. And he carried, too, a helmet–for one and only one run–which came in
handy when his raft landed on his head. And he carried, when the trip was done, a tan that was wholly inappropriate
for the Pacific Northwest.

And Hazel Clark carried a quiet competence and a willingness to work hard and without attention, an attitude
underscored by an elegant English accent, although her long stay in canyon country had eroded the accent to such
an extent that she no longer was able to say “al-you-min-ee-um” in proper British fashion without prompting.

And the writer carried a tiny netbook and a keen eye for other people’s failings and eccentricities, and also an
unvarying habit of shouting “Disaster!” anytime that he spilled or dropped something during cooking duty, which
added greatly to the excitement of everyone in camp and made supper much more enjoyable for all. And he carried,
too, a thick grey cable-knit sweater which he wore in the morning in camp before repacking his dry bags and
carrying them down the steep beaches and loading and strapping them onto his boat. And he carried an endless
knowledge of natural history, from the giant cave bears and canyon lions whose claw marks can still be seen on
the basalt walls, to the little-known rowing goats and how the lyrics to the instructional song “Row, Row, Row
Your Goat” have become corrupted over the years to the present “Boat” which totally destroys the memory of the
intrepid tundra goatmen, who, lacking wood to build boats, would capture mountain goats and row them across the
rivers. And all of the rest of them, especially ten-year-old Natalie, who was most frequently the target of the
writer’s instruction, carried an unfounded tendency to automatically disbelieve anything the writer said.

And most important, the writer carried a river hat with a braided blue cord around the brim and snaps on the side
that allowed one side or the other to be folded up against his head, and it was the hat that the river had given
him in exchange for the one he had lost in unkar Rapid many days before.

And Tom Martin, whose maps and guidebooks they all carried with them, carried high rubber boots that he wore on
the colder days–thigh-high boots that made him look like either a river pirate or a dominatrix, depending on the
propensities of the observer. And Tom carried also a habit of prompting Natalie to pester her grandpa for her own
kayak each morning, and he carried the knowledge and experience of more than fifty Canyon river trips. And he
carried, too, an infectious enthusiasm and an unvarying belief that anyone, even a never-rowed-whitewater rookie
from Wisconsin, could handle the big rapids and the holes and the eddies and all the challenges of the Canyon.

But the best of them, Natalie, carried this: a giggle that can light up the river, a strength and unending
enthusiasm for rowing heavy boats, and a happy grin and a habit of running the most difficult rapids multiple
times, and an amazing analytical ability to read the rivers (“Norm is going too far right,” she said just before
he flipped on the Killer Fangs. “He isn’t going to make it.”), and a high tolerance for hiking and scrambling up
loose rocky peaks, and also a disappointing ability to know when the writer was lying to her about giant cave bears
and rowing goats, and an enthusiasm for lollipops and cocoa-covered almonds.

And now, on the final day, they carried the need to pack up camp one more time and leave the Canyon behind for
now. Straps, coolers, frames, floors, oars, oarlocks, everything must be stripped off the rubber boats and loaded
somewhere else, and endless sorting of gear and bags and boxes and stoves and tents and ammo cans, and the wooden
boats loaded onto their trailers, and all of it a last long ritual to mark their passage down the river.

And the group will separate, and go their separate ways, and maybe never assemble again in this exact combination;
yet they will carry with them, all of the boatmen and passengers, the memory of their time on the river and their
long slow timeless trip down the Canyon and between the high stone walls. And after the last great unloading of
boats and re-packing of gear they’ll return to school and jobs and life outside the Canyon, but they will not
return unchanged.

Today’s run takes us from our camp at Bridge Canyon, river mile 235, a long long way to somewhere around mile
263–twenty-eight or twenty-nine miles. We’re hoping for tailwinds.

Here below Diamond Creek, we’re actually heading into the upper reaches of Lake Mead. The Canyon is a bit wider here,
more open, and all along the steep sandy banks are piles of sand dropped here as the river slowly silts out. Glen
Canyon Dam, two hundred and sixty miles upstream, prevents the Colorado River’s natural cycle of floods from flushing
the Canyon free from silt and debris, and imposes a time limit–no one is sure how long, of course–on the lifespan
of Hoover Dam downstream. Eventually Lake Mead will be filled with silt; Glen Canyon Dam is only delaying the
inevitable, a brief anomaly in the steady flow of geologic time.

Our new crew members–Rich Turner, Helen, Elmira, Kristin, and John–are adjusting well. We have one tiny riffle
left just below camp, so I remind everyone that today is probably their last chance to join the Colorado River
Swim Club. Eventually we shove off and head downriver, but no one takes advantage of the opportunity.

And then for a long long long long long time we float down the river. Just when it seems it can’t go on any longer,
it does. There’s the usual stop for lunch along a sandy beach and then the day continues. At least, for the most
part, we’ve had the hoped-for tail winds. But there are snaky corners of the Canyon where headwinds prevail.
Craig Wolfson actually has a wind-ometer aboard the Susie R, and at lunch he tells me the highest gust he recorded
was thirty-seven miles per hour. Having rowed Fat George through the headwinds, I’m convinced the highest gust are
a good ten miles per hour over his readings.

There’s another new arrival at lunch: the Gem’s missing oar, lost yesterday. Another group of rafters found it and
left it on a beach with a “For Sale” sign attached. Some of our boatmen saw it and hid it away on their boats. Now
at lunch they present the missing oar to Tom Martin. The Gem’s flip just became a lot less expensive than Tom thought
it would be. We stand around at our lunch beach eating sandwiches–our new crew members brought in fresh mangoes,
tomatoes, and lettuce. Lunch just got better. But finally we’re underway again, with miles to go before we camp.

Headwinds and Other Disasters

I thought rowing my little fourteen-foot sailboat Jagular in stiff headwinds was tough work, but after tbree weeks
of a two-thousand pound raft I’ve changed my mind. Today the wind is blowing so hard there are whitecaps on the
river, and if you stop rowing for a moment you’re parked in the current, or even heading upstream. Finally I
discover part of the problem: Dave Mortenson, my morning crew, (always blame the crew) has left a mesh bag filled
with half a dozen cans of PBR hanging off the port bow. It’s a great sea anchor–we’re last in our fleet of ten
boats by a long stretch. At least we’ve handed out river-chilled cans of PBR to the boats that have passed us.
Slow but popular–that’s us.

But we’re doing better than we were yesterday, when Dave Mortenson was riding shotgun aboard Fat George. It was
his second day riding with me. The first, a long ways back, was when we ran Horn Creek Rapid together and I almost
successfully gave Dave the deep six by cleverly neglecting to tie down the hatch cover that he was using for a
handhold as we went into the eight-foot drop. Yesterday, though, we did one better. Approaching a minor ripple
with a single spike of rock–maybe two feet of obstruction in a river a hundred feet wide–we piled directly
onto the rock.

There are a number of things that can happen when you hit a rock. You can, in a rubber boat, bounce off. Or you
can slide over into the hole that’s usually waiting beneath. Or you can grind to halt and get stuck on top of the
rock. Or, perhaps most interestingly, you can slide up on the rock, get briefly stuck, and drop the downriver
side of the boat into the hole while the upriver side is still parked on the rock. This last option is usually
the most dramatic. It’s the one Dave and I chose–sideways.

There’s no disaster you can encounter in a raft that you can’t make even more interesting by going into it
sideways. For a long moment our raft hung on the rock, broadside to the current, and then the port side dropped
into the hole. I had a brief glimpse of Dave hurled from side to side, banging around the cockpit and sliding
across the decks, and then I was throwing my body toward the starboard side–the high side–of the boat. This
move is, appropriately enough, known as high-siding. In theory, the application of a terrified boatman’s weight
with the proper amount of force can counter the seemingly inevitable flip that precedes the usual high-side
maneuver.

Remember that this one single rock was the only obstruction in an otherwise completely placid stretch of river.
But a skilled boatman can find excitement everywhere. It takes a keen eye and a lot of river sense to pick out
and run the most challenging line.

We came through our high-siding intact, and only had to do a few dozen laps in the recirculating keeper hole
below the rock before we were spat back into the current. I thought it would be the day’s moment of high
drama–until the later boat flips and swimmers dropped it off the list. But now, a day later, replaying the
incident allows a temporary escape from the tedium of intermittent headwinds.

From the Fury of the Norsemen, Good Lord, Deliver Us

And then the longship appears on the river. Or, more accurately, two rafts lashed together end-to-end: Cece and
Yoshie have joined forces, with Elmira, Pam Mortenson, and Natalie aboard as crew. I’m enticed to join them, on
the theory that misery loves company, or a fool and his money being soon parted, or something like that. Now
that I’ve removed my PBR sea anchor from the water I’m making good time, and I’m reluctant at first. But I’m
intrigued, too: will the usual theoretical limit on hull speed (Hull Speed = 1.34 x the square root of a boat’s
waterline length) hold true for rubber rafts lashed together? I tie onto their stern to find out.

Results of the empirical testing are inconclusive. We may well be the fastest boat on the river, but the three
boats’ insane inchworming means we’re covering twice as many river miles as anyone else. We rig a steering oar
at the stern of Fat George to try to keep our boat straight–or at least, straighter than the U-shaped monstrosity
that seems to be its natural shape–but the steering oar proves to be a mistake. Natalie immediately takes charge
of it, and starts shouting orders to her crew.

“Pull! Pull!” she shouts in true despot fashion, keeping a tempo we can’t match. We keep rowing, and she keeps
shouting. “Pull! Pull!” Every now and then she shoves the steering oar far to port, or to starboard. Results seem
to be the same either way. Our crew keeps rowing hard–believe it or not, we’re still ahead of several other boats.
The Portola catches us and briefly ties in at the bow to make it a four-boat flotilla, a fifty-four footer, but
Greg Hatten stays attached only long enough to row us into an eddy, where he drops his connecting lines and rows
away like a rat deserting a sinking ship.

In fact, the only way to steer our longship, it turns out, is for the lead boatman to row like hell and point the
lead raft in the direction we’re hoping to go. Eventually–usually–the tail end of the train will snake around like
a sidewinder and head in the same general direction. By then, though, it’ll be time for the lead boatman to make a
correction in the opposite direction. And so we row down the river, snaking along in giant S-curves and steering like
a Mississippi tugboat captain, planning the next move several bends of the river in advance.

But we’re still ahead of a couple of boats. Well, we’re ahead of one boat–Ian and Hazel–after Richard passes us in
the Susie Too. We’re expecting to camp at any moment so we keep rowing hard. Can’t let Ian pass us before camp. It’s
just up ahead. But hmm… the other eight boats are already pulling out, so far ahead we can barely make them out.
We’re not camping there, it seems. We pass another potential campsite, and another, and still none of the boats stop.

None of the campsites we’ve passed have been particularly attractive–they’re silted out and overgrown with
tamarisk–but by this point the crew of the longship is willing to settle for a shrub to tie off to and a night
aboard. Anything to stop rowing. We rotate in and out for breaks, and talk about throwing Pam Mortenson overboard
so we can blow our man overboard whistles and bring the rest of the fleet to a forced halt. But finally it occurs
to us that not only does my boat have the cooler with all of our fresh food aboard, but we’ve also got all the PBR.
We’re pretty self-sufficient, which cheers us up immeasurably. We rummage around in the cooler and discover lunch
meat, cheese, and better yet, a bag of left-over Dutch oven brownies. I immediately eat a chunk of brownie bigger
than my head and begin rowing with increased vigor.

And up ahead the boats have pulled into camp. twenty minutes later and we’re tied up alongside. There are no
brownies left.

Today’s run takes us on a fifteen-mile run from our camp at Upper Two Hundred Twenty Mile Camp to Bridge Canyon, at
river mile 235. Along the way we’re stopping at Diamond Creek to pick up five new river rats who are traveling on
their own river permit: John, Helen, Elmira, Rich, and Kristin. The river mindset has sunk too far for me to have
learned their last names yet. Last names, clocks, calendars–these past few weeks have stripped these things of all
relevance. So, John, Helen, Elmira, Rich, and Kristin.

Hazel Clark and I are on the river early, by 8:00. Our plan is to get down to Diamond and have the new passengers
loaded by the time the rest of the fleet arrives. They’re bringing in fresh vegetables and an entire boat cooler
loaded with ice and perishable goods, which will go on Fat George, replacing my long-empty cooler. We arrive at Diamond
a little early–the Hualapai use this take-out as a staging area for motor trips, and non-Hualapai aren’t allowed to
land before 10:00. We watch a couple of motor rigs growl and whine their way into the river, hauling well-behaved
tourists parked in rows on the deck. Not quite the same experience as an oar boat like Fat George, where the only
sound is the splash of the waves and a perennially squeaky oarlock, punctuated by the intermittent whisper of
WD-40 spray.

The exchange works as scheduled, amazingly enough, and with much shuffling of bags and hauling of boxes and carrying
of coolers–carrying a fully loaded raft cooler is like being a pall-bearer for a fat man–and more strapping of
straps and battening of hatches and packing of bread boxes, we’re off into the river’s flow again.

It Ain’t Easy

Rich Turner is the first of the new river rats to end up in the water. He was rowing the Gem through Two Hundred
Thirty-One Mile Rapid, with Tom Martin as a passenger.

“I wasn’t used to the boat as I thought I was,” Rich says, “and I thought I could run that hole and I couldn’t.”
“It was one of those thousand-dollar flips,” Tom Martin says. “Cha-ching–oarlock, two hundred dollars;
cha-ching–camera, seven hundred dollars.”

He laughs, clearly unperturbed by the loss of gear; Leif Mortenson, resident computer-electronic genius, has
managed to save all the data from the camera’s memory cards, at least. “And the whole point,” Tom goes on,
“is to get these boats on the river, get people rowing them.”

And besides, Rich Turner and Tom Martin aren’t the only ones who ended up in the river, earning their Colorado
Swim Club T-shirts (a second one for Tom); Elmira, riding with Greg Hatten in the Portola, ended up swimming part
of the same rapid.

“So here’s the question,” David Perez says our later discussion. “If a man pushes you in the river, and then pulls
you out, is he a hero, or a criminal?”

That, it turns out, is exactly what Greg Hatten did–from a certain point of view.

“Here’s what my mind says happened,” Greg says. “We got hit by a lateral in the front quarter panel of the boat.
It kind of stopped us, tilted us on edge, and a wave came right over the bow and hit Elmira in the face. I think
it surprised us both more than anything. Elmira lost her hold and it knocked her to the low side of the boat, and
the force of the wave knocked her out of the boat and she was swimming.”

The next fifteen seconds of the rapid were busy ones for Greg. “It seemed like it took thirty minutes,” he says.
He left the oars, grabbed Elmira from the front of the boat (she was still clinging to the gunwale), pulled her back
in, and returned to the oars to find one of them knocked out of its socket.

“It was flopping around way outside my reach,” Greg says. So he pulled out a spare oar–all of this in the middle
of the rapid, in the same fifteen-second stretch of time–and got it into the oarlock. But now there were some big
waves coming up, and he didn’t have time to turn the boat bow-first into them. Instead, he turned stern-first and
rowed hard.

“And now we were in the middle part of the rapid and there were some big waves and we were going backward,” Greg
says. “The rocks at the bottom of this thing really worried me.”

With good reason; they were headed toward a couple of rocks big enough to make matchsticks of a wooden hull like
the Portola. But they came through fine–the Portola is not a double-ender for nothing. And Elmira enjoyed her first
big adventure, and her welcome to the Colorado River Swim Club.

“I was more shaken than she was,” Greg says later. “I was like shaking, and she was calming me down. She was a
great sport.”

“It made her day,” Hazel Clark says.

Carnage at Killer Fang Falls

“Even if cameras would have been operational,” Greg says, “who would have been filming Norm?”

Norm, who rows our sweep boat, is the river rat’s river rat. He’s been through guide school, he knows the Canyon,
he rows rocky technical whitewater like Southern California’s Kern River. He positions his boat in the fastest part
of the current without thinking about it, passing people while barely rowing. Norm is utterly reliable. When we’re
filming big rapids, Norm runs them last, with the camera man and all the water-sensitive camera gear aboard. His
runs tend to be boring on film: flat and stable and dry and uneventful.

The next rapid–Killer Fang Falls–is a tricky one, though. As soon as I see it, I’m glad that I’ve handed the oars
of Fat George off to our cameraman, Ian McCluskey, for the day. It’s a big rapid, the kind where the horizon line at
river level comes to a sharp edge as the water drops out of sight beyond. Not only does that kind of thing mean a
big rapid, it also makes judging your entry point difficult, with every landmark invisible below the drop. Ian will
have to deal with all of that.

“All that stuff about the trip being over after Lava Falls,” Craig Wolfson says, “is garbage.” Lava may be the
biggest rapid, with the biggest number attached, but it’s not the only rapid in the Canyon, or the last.

At the top of Killer Fang Falls, the left side (except for a knife-edge run that obviously takes more skill, or luck,
or both, than I can muster) is blocked by what looks like a huge ball of water rolling over and over in the current.
Think of a giant Easter egg, one big enough to hold a couple of full-grown elephants, buried halfway in the river
and spinning away, the top of the egg rolling back upriver, and the downstream side of the egg a huge hole that could
bury a cottage to its eaves. Row a raft through there and you’d FEEL like you were being trampled by a couple of
elephants.

That leaves the right side open for a run. The trick is to brush past the rolling ball of water on its far right side,
almost in the center of the rapid, which puts you directly into a couple of big waves. Big as in the kind of waves
where water will be pouring down INTO your boat as you go through them.

But that’s the easy part. The real trick to Killer Fang Falls–the feature that gives the rapid its name–is a trio
or Harley-Davidson-sized granite fangs at the bottom right side of the rapid, poised there like huge shark teeth
protruding four or five feet from the boiling water. And all the water in the entire rapid is being pushed directly,
strongly, relentlessly, unceasingly and unabashedly toward the Fangs. And where the water goes, boats go with it.

So the real difficulty at Killer Fang Falls is to spin your boat around after the two big waves so you can get a good
ferry angle to pull hard past the jagged rocks–pulling “like a Norseman with his ass on fire,” Ian McCluskey explains
it. If you manage not to get spun around and lose your angle, AND you pull hard enough, AND you get lucky–if all that
happens, you might zip by the Fangs without hitting them.

The wooden boats make the run first, and all of them pass the Fangs without incident, although several of them surf
past the jagged rocks on the pillow of rebounding water at the base of the rocks.

“To get that surf you have to pass within six inches,” Greg Hatten explains. But at Killer Fang Falls, six inches
counts as a successful run.

Richard Carrier put it more succinctly as he coasted past the Fangs: “Holy sheet!”

Hazel Clark is the first raft down, with Pam Mortenson as her passenger.

“I’ve decided she’s not the best influence on my boat,” Hazel says. Pam was the passenger during Hazel’s Hance Rapid
swim, and maybe that has something to do with their run through Killer Fang Falls, because Hazel and Pam manage to hit
the one of the Fangs with the side of their boat.

“It was an ‘Oh, shit’ moment,” Hazel says later. her English accent managing to make even scatological references sound
elegant and refined.

Greh Hatten was watching their run, and saw Hazel and Pam coming own on the Fangs.

“She had about enough time for one last dig, and it was perfectly executed so the boat was spinning and kind of glanced
off instead of flipping,” he explains.

Which justifies Hazel’s perennial advice to Canyon boatmen: Never give up. Keep rowing, keep trying. Pull hard. You
might get lucky.

Ian’s Run

We slide down the V. I’m riding in the bow, nervous about being a passenger instead of an oarsman, but at the same
time glad to be reprieve of all responsibility; it’s a mean-looking rapid. But Ian puts me perfectly at ease as we
drop down toward the teeth of the rapid:

“Here comes the big fucking hole,” he says, taking a half stroke to straighten the raft, and then we’re in it, both of
us laughing.

We pound through the two big waves, water crashing down on us from above, and then Ian has the boat turned and he’s
pulling hard to get away from the Fangs. We pass by with plenty of room to spare, and Ian parks us in an eddy. The
other boats come down, generally without problems, and we’re about to slide off into the current and continue. Norm,
our sweep boat, is the only one left. Norm never has problems.

Afterwards, Pam Wolfson, who is Norm’s passenger at Killer Fang Falls, has a suggestion. “Next time he should read
the guidebook,” she says. “Where it says ‘Go left, not right.'”

But Norm has seen a possible far right run, and apparently has decided to give it a try. Which is, apparently, a bad
idea, because when I look up I see Norm’s boat sideways to the current, just about to smash into the biggest of the
Fangs. And all hell breaks loose.

“Row!” I tell Ian, and start blowing my whistle as Norm and Pam flip rather dramatically onto the sharp-toothed rocks.
As Ian rows toward the now upside-down raft, I unbuckle the toss line from my raft frame and get ready. Pam is just
ahead of us in the water, safely below the Fangs, and with a couple of shouts I get her attention. My toss is
downstream and ten feet away–far from perfect–but Pam is able to swim to the line and I pull her aboard. Meanwhile
our other boats converge on Norm and the overturned raft and pull it to safety.

“Can you believe that?” Pam Wolfson says later. “Two weeks wearing a drysuit, and then the weather warms up. Take all
the gear off, and splash!” It’s her first time swimming any rapids in the Canyon in all her trips. Murphy’s Law in
action.

We’re well-rehearsed in raft-flipping by now. Cece Mortenson scrambles up some nearby cliffs to set an anchor, and
Craig Wofson helps her set up a static line and an eight-to-one pulley system. Then a few people stand on the raft’s
near-side tube while the rest of us haul like hell on the pulley ropes. The raft comes up and over, thumping Norm on
the head for good measure as it comes right-side up, and the rescue is over.

Later I ask Norm what he expected as he slid down toward the Fangs, which have been known to rip rubber boats to
shreds.

“What did I expect?” Norm says. “I expected to be upright.”

I persist in my questioning. “That could have been really bad,” I say. “What were you thinking as you came down on
those rocks?”

“What am I doing here?” Norm says, laughing. “I told Pam to hang on, that’s all.”

Still, I want to know how Norm ended up in trouble in the first place. Was the current too strong? Did he get spun
around and lose his ferry angle? Pop an oar out of its socket?

“I got surfed big time to the right,” Norm explains.

“Wrong entry,” says his longtime friend Craigh Wolfson, shaking his head.

“No, I went right,” Norm says.

“I know,” Craig says, laughing quietly and shaking his head again. “That was a mistake.”

I have to wonder what our five new companions think of their introduction to the trip. We’ve broken our previous
disaster record, putting five people in the water and flipping two boats in a single day. It’s two more days of flat
water until the end of the trip, but we’re camped above a rapid tonight, at Bridge Canyon. Makes me wonder what will
happen first thing in the morning when we shove off.

Just how big is this Colorado River Swim Club going to get? When I joined it was kind of an exclusive thing. Not so
anymore.

I celebrate my successful and mostly dry day riding with Captain Ian by joining Cece, Natalie, and Elmira for a hike up
Bridge Canyon before supper. About a mile above camp is a natural bridge, a flat-topped arch maybe forty feet above the
canyon floor. But Cece being Cece, and Natalie being Natalie, we end up scrambling up forty feet of loose rock so we can
actually CROSS the bridge. We run across one by one, each of us acting out the solution to my “Three Golen Walruses of
the Anasazi” riddle as we go.

And from the far side of the bridge, Cece and Natalie point out, it’s not that much farther to the summit of the ridge,
a rocky sharktoothed peak high up at the head of Bridge Canyon, above a dramatic waterfall in the canyon’s right branch.

Again, we get back to camp just at dark. Another perfect day.

Today’s run takes us from camp at Indian Canyon at mile 207 to the upper camp at Two Hundred and Twenty Mile, another
large sandy beach on river right. The biggest rapid we’ll face, now that we’ve run Lava Falls, will be Two Hundred and
Nine Mile Rapid–an easy right run, unless you choose to punch through the big hole in the center.

For some reason, David Perez decides to run the hole.

“It was the demon alcohol that made him do it,” Craig Wolfson says.

Cece agrees. “It was the shot of moonshine he had before the rapid,” she says.

“No,” says David. “I just wanted to run the hole. You know, because it was there.” But then, after careful
consideration, he adds, “The Riesling did contribute.”

Of course, running the hole doesn’t necessarily lead to disaster. That’s what David was counting on, it turns out.

“I thought that I would hit it straight, and, uh, that the raft would stand up and then we’d wash over it, on the
other side. I thought at worst I would swim.” He pauses. “I did not think I would get a raft landing on my head.”

“Anything else you want to say about your run?” I ask David.

He stops to think for a moment. “I wouldn’t recommend it.”

I wouldn’t either. Cece Mortenson and I ran our rafts through just ahead of David, on the theory that we might be able
to pull a swimmer out of the water, or grab a wayward raft, if things go wrong. Which they quickly do. I watch David
line up on the hole–the big raft-eating hole I carefully skirted on the left side–and it seems ok. He’s approaching
sideways, making lateral adjustments, inching forward, backward, lining things up to give himself the best chance.

“And then,” he says, “when it was just a split second too late, I tried to turn my boat around and go in the hole.
Straight.”

Instead he goes in sideways. From my position below the rapid I see David’s raft stand up vertically, bow in the sky.
All I can see is the raft’s black bottom. I have time to think, ‘He’s either going to swim or flip’ and start to grab
the whistle on my life vest when the raft goes over. I start maneuvering my raft to intercept him, my toss line in hand
as I row.

What happened, I find out later, was that the raft’s aluminum deck–a flat metal surface lashed on top of the rubber
tube to provide a stable walking area and place to tie gear–that heavy metal plate smashed down onto David’s head when
his raft overturned.

“Well, so, my memory is, I went out, the raft went up, and there’s this giant piece of metal landing on my head,”
David says. “It seemed like there was a definite pause between me going in the water and the raft coming down on top
of me. And then I looked up and it was coming right at me.”

Luckily he was wearing a helmet–the only rapid on the entire trip that he wore a helmet for.

Z-Pulleys and Flip Lines

I completely miss my intercept, and David’s raft sails past. By this time David has climbed onto the upside-down raft,
and Cece catches hold. We get pushed downstream quite a ways before we are able to maneuver the overturned raft into a
small eddy on river right. We’re alone–the rest of the team is still running the rapid. We tie up our rafts and pull
David’s boat upstream to a small beach. Here Cece ties flip lines to the frame of the raft and rigs a 6-to-1 Z-pulley
system to a boulder. Richard Carrier, our Frenchman from Chile, arrives, and we try to flip the boat by standing on the
near-side tube and pulling hard on the flip lines, leaning into them with all our weight.

A fully loaded raft can weigh 2,000 pounds. Our weight is not enough. Eventually, though, a bunch of other boats arrive
and, with all of us hauling on the lines and climbing onto the near-side tube, we flip it over. Rescue over. David has
a sore neck, but the helmet probably kept him from far worse injuries. And we’re off, down the river.

Conch Shells and Shakespeare

Like her father, Cece is an instigator. We’re on supper crew and she completely disregards the recipe, concocting a
complicated array of food that uses all four burners of our camp stove, a Dutch oven, and even the propane blaster we
use to heat dish water. By the time she’s done every dish in the camp kitchen is dirty.

Why? She has arrange a party: she’s invited a group of rafters camped just downstream to a party. And the party, when
it arrives, is howling and dancing and singing, prancing along in full costume: a man in a clown suit, two men dressed
as Major John Wesley Powell (complete with missing arm), at least one cross-dresser in lingerie of some kind–not his
most risqué outfit, he says–and various other oddities. They’re a dance troupe, we find out, based in northern Arizona,
and share the dance community’s typical lack of inhibitions. Before the night is over a bottle of brandy has been
emptied, conch shells have been blown, drums have been beaten, Shakespeare has been recited, Cece loses a handstand
competition (never challenge a group of dancers and gymnasts), and we’ve enjoyed a fully theatricalized performance
of Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky.”

Pressed to respond in kind, our group calls on me. “We have a riddler,” they say. So now it’s up to me. I start with
the easy ones: the Riddle of the Sphinx (solved quickly); the Three Golden Walruses of the Anasazi (also solved quickly),
and then it’s on to level two.

The Truth teller and the Liar. This one has them stumped, and the party falls silent. One of them–she’s dressed in a
feathered headdress and some kind of tutu, I think–comments that my riddle-posing is “like a turd in a punch bowl.”
I move back to an easier one (Bob Goes to Work on a Ferry and Comes Home Early One Day) but, even though this one is
straight algebra, and they have a math professor among them, they’re still stumped. Tom Martin has me tell them the
answer–something I never do–but the party has lost momentum. Too much thinking, too little drum-banging. With a few
last soundings of their conch, the dance troupe marches off into the darkness and we’re alone again.

David Perez, who played the biggest part in emptying a bottle of brandy the dance troupe sent over a couple of hours
before the party, has slept through the entire drum-banging singing dancing howling clown-suited crossdressing event.

Today we’ll be running a long day on the river, from our camp at 185 Mile to Indian Canyon on river right at mile 207.
Day nineteen of our twenty-four day trip. Two hours of battery remaining for this blog.

The past eighteen days have slid by relentlessly, rolling along like the river itself until life in camp and on the
boats and hiking the side canyons has expanded to fill our awareness so that it takes a conscious effort to remind
myself that I have another life waiting for me in Idaho, in Wisconsin. Houses, cars, jobs, all these things are
irrelevant to life in the Canyon, and they are all surprisingly easy to forget about, to ignore. We’re on geologic
time now, and much of what passes for life outside the Canyon has been forgotten for now.

Rock walls and tumbled boulders, rapids, blooming ocotillo and prickly pear, the mud-brown flow of water and the
whisper of distant rapids. Bighorn sheep, sun-hungry lizards and rattlesnakes, sand and wind and blue skies–these
have become our world. None of us are eager to leave it all behind. Yet the awareness that our time here is coming
to an end cannot be completely avoided.

Our flotilla pulls out and day 19 begins.

The Run

An uneventful day, but the uneventfulness IS the event. We’re lucky with the wind again–nothing but intermittent
breezes–and it’s another blue-sky sunny day. Ten-year-old Natalie is rowing with me today; apparently an evening of
card tricks and logic puzzles has convinced her that I’m a reputable boatman. We each grab a gourmet lollipop from
Greg Hatten to tide us through until lunch, and we’re off.

I spend the day’s quiet float instructing Natalie on the geology and fauna of the Canyon. Now we’re into the volcanic
dikes and basalt formations.

“See this rock here,” I say, “how it looks like giant claw marks?”

She nods.

“That’s where the giant cave bears used to come to sharpen their claws,” I tell her. She giggles and shakes her head.

“Well, you’re right,” I say. “This isn’t really bear country. Those claw marks are probably from the giant Canyon
mountain lions that live here.”

She giggles harder. It’s hard to educate someone who can’t keep a serious focus on the topic, so I give up. We pull
up to Greg Hatten in the Portola and get more lollipops instead–Banana Split flavor this time. And the river flows
on, and we float gently downstream, past a sharply spiked rock twenty-five feet tall.

“See that rock?” I ask. “That’s the petrified tooth of a giant Canyon shark. They’re extinct now, but there used to
be all kinds of them in the Colorado.”

“No,” Natalie says, giggling. “Too big!”

Today’s youth have no respect for the wisdom of their elders.

After lunch Natalie jumps ship–no patience for the rigorous curriculum demands aboard Fat George–and I’m alone.
It’s a quiet float through flat water punctuated by tiny ripples and one rapid, 205-Mile. It’s a 6, and might have
caused me a moment of worry in the first days of the trip. Today we all float through without scouting. Some medium
waves, but I come out mostly dry.

Indian Canyon

We reach camp in the early afternoon and, after the usual unstrapping and unloading and carrying and setting up the
kitchen and the chairs, I’m free from camp duties. Cece Mortenson and I decide to go on a hike. There are two options:
a casual flat stroll up Indian Canyon’s dry wash, or a steep climb up a rock-studded ridge above camp, eighteen hundred
feet above river level.

Given the fact that one of us is a fool and the other a professional mountain guide based in the Canadian Rockies,
it’s no surprise that we opt for the ridge climb.

The hike begins with a short easy scramble up the rock ledges above camp, and then three-quarters of a mile of steep
slopes of sand and scree. At the top of these we’re into complicated entrenchments of Canyon limestone, edging
carefully along narrow ledges above a long drop. At the end of the narrow ledges, there’s a chute between two fins.

Cece is already halfway up the chute by the time I get to the end of the ledges.

“It’s like third or fourth class scrambling,” she calls down, one hand on the rock and her feet smeared on small edges
in the limestone. “The hardest part is that you don’t want to bushwhack it.”

When I start climbing the chute I immediately find out what she means. The bottom of the chute holds enough dirt to
support a good selection of desert plants. And, evolution in action, desert plants have evolved defenses to protect
the precious moisture inside them: thorns. Spines. Prickles. Spikes. The trick of climbing this chute is that gravity
and fear suggests you climb the bottom of the chute, securely tucked deep between the rock walls.

The reception you’d get at the bottom, though–sword yuccas, prickly pear, even the names suggesting the need for a
healthy distance–that unpleasantness overrules fear and gravity. Instead of cowering at the bottom of the chute as
I normally would, I climb as far out on the edge as I can. My right foot is on the chute’s right wall, my left on the
chute’s left wall, stemming up the dihedral. And my hands–one is generally grabbing a hold in the knife-edged
limestone (in the Canyon even the rocks have spikes) while the other, between searching for the next hold, carefully
nudges a sword yucca or a thorny branch out-of-the-way.

But it’s not too hard, actually, and soon I’m at the top of the chute, where there is no more up. We’re on the top of
the ridge, far above camp. We pause for a couple of photos–the tiny boats fifteen hundred feet below little more then
specks of red, white, and blue–and enjoy the rewards of the climb. As I turn in a circle to admire the view, I notice
the next summit in the ridge a few hundred yards further south of us.

“Let’s go,” I tell Cece.

“You want to keep going?” she asks. I think she was expecting me to want to turn around; I’ve been lagging behind the
whole trip. But I’m not smart enough for that. I’m just slow.

“I didn’t come this far to NOT go up that one,” I say.

Besides, it’s an easy hike from here. We both go up to the next rounded summit, where we’re seventeen hundred feet
above the Colorado. And again, a quarter-mile along the ridge further on, is a new high point, this one a dramatic
rocky platform hanging high between the main Canyon on the left and a side canyon (209-Mile Canyon) on the right.
Cece and I start forward almost without having to think about it.

We get to the new rocky summit, a stunning platform that drops steeply down to a canyon on each side. Eighteen
hundred feet above the river. And just ahead, past some rocky scrambling, the next high point beckons, a jumbled
mass of sharp-toothed limestone fins and towers and standing stones. It won’t be THAT hard to get to…

We get back to camp just as full dark arrives.

Today our run takes us from camp at river left–Above Anvil–to Lava Falls, just two miles downstream. I haven’t thought
much past Lava, the biggest baddest most-talked-about rapid in the Canyon. We’ll be camping somewhere below if we make it
that far. Probably not a long day on the river; it’ll take too long filming the boats run the rapid. And–maybe–rescuing
people. At least it’s another warm and sunny day, perfect weather again and again, nothing but blue skies and
shorts-and-T-shirts weather. Which is exactly what I want for a run through Lava Falls, which promises not to be dry no
matter how it ends up.

Looking in Tom Martin’s river guide, though, Lava Falls doesn’t look that bad–except for the 9 in parentheses behind the
name. As in, 9 out of 10. But there are rapids with bigger vertical drops.

“Is Lava Falls really only a thirteen-foot drop?” I ask as I’m giving the map a good study before breakfast.

“It’s immediate,” Greg Hatten says. “Comes in a very small package.”

“Aaaaaaaaaah!” says Tom Martin, acting out a run through Lava with a few appropriate gesticulations. Then: “Next boat.”

Sink or swim, a run through Lava Falls takes about twenty seconds. I’m guessing the long slide down the tongue into the
rapid takes about twenty years.

Vulcan’s Throne

After the usual heavy lifting, loading, and more-careful-than-usual strapping down of gear, I hand off Fat George’s
oars to Cece Mortenson for the short run down to scout Lava. Almost immediately we’re passing a basalt column forty
feet high in the middle of the river, a formation known–with the usual respect for Native traditions–Vulcan’s Throne.
We’re in volcano country. A geologist could pin that down a little more specifically, but what I know comes from Tom
Martin’s river guide:

“Once past Honga Spring, if you look up and back high up in the Redwall cliffs on river left, you will see a perched
remnant of basalt over 1,000 feet above the river level. Let your imagination fill the entire canyon with lava and you
have the picture. If the “lake” behind the highest lava dams here ever filled, the headwaters were up near Moab, UT!”

Then, at geologic tempos, the huge lava dams were eroded by the silt-laden waters of the Colorado (think 4-grit liquid
sandpaper and a few loooong days in the Canyon boatshop) and the huge lake dropped, leaving the Canyon as we see it
today. Which is, deep and narrow–the inner gorge, anyway–and obstructed by rapids at nearly every place a side canyon
exists to wash debris into the main Canyon. A series of rapids that includes Lava Falls, the biggest rapid in the Canyon,
which we’ll be running soon.

Very soon.

Traffic Jam at Lava

We pull in at river right to scout the rapid, and immediately we’re in the middle of a horde of boats. There are five
separate river trips all gathered here: us, the Brits who rescued Yoshie at Havasu, a group from Arkansas, Scott and
Rob’s group in their multi-colored boats, and a group from Telluride and Vail. Our group, with ten boats, is probably
the biggest, but there have to be somewhere between thirty and forty boats gathered above the rapid, with a gaggle of
kayaks, inflatable duckies, and mini-kayaks buzzing around like hummingbirds between to fat rafts. Everyone climbs up
the trail on river right to a high overlook above the rapid’s entry. Eighty people or so, all staring down at the waves
and holes and rocks and trying to mentally project a safe line through.

Our group, of course, is filming, which slows us down more than most. We’ll let most of the others go first. Today is
a two-camera set-up; Norm runs the high camera at the scout point sixty feet above the river’s level, and Ian is down
low with another camera. Dave Mortenson, again, is poised to take still photos. But all that maneuvering takes time.
Time for those of us just standing around to take a loooong look at the rapid.

The Rapid

Lava Falls, it turns out, may be over-hyped. Sure, it’s a 9 of 10. And yes, the waves are big. But at today’s water
flow–about 10,000 cubic feet per second (less than a tenth of what Moulty Fulmer and Pat Reilly faced on their 1957
trip, though they didn’t make it as far as Lava that year, and wouldn’t have run it if they had)–it’s about as friendly
as it ever gets. Which is not a guarantee.

The whole trick here, apparently, is to NOT go into the Ledge Hole. The Ledge Hole is a big raft-eating hole beneath
a large pourover, a five-foot vertical drop over a rock ledge. This vicious entry blocks the center of the river, right
at the top of the rapid.

Hazel Clark knows firsthand what the Ledge Hole is like, from a run on an earlier trip:

“I felt like I got halfway across, and then it pulls you back,” she says. “And I’m like, ‘Oh, shit, I’m not getting out
of this.’ I didn’t jump off until the boat flipped,” she explains. “Normally I wouldn’t do that–I want to stay with the
boat–but I’ve seen the videos. Quite often when a boat flips there, it stays in the same place.”

“This is where the term “maytagged” comes from,” Tom Martin puts in. “Getting turned over and over and over and over.”

If you want to see what the Ledge Hole can do, search Youtube for a video called “Carnage at Lava Falls,” posted by
Duwain Whitis (the co-author of Tom Martin’s river guide). Luckily, there’s no internet access here while we’re waiting
to run Lava ourselves.

We’ll run Lava on the right side–the left run is too rocky today–so I want to position my raft to punch through the
far right side of the Ledge Hole, barely brushing its tail, where there’s a big lateral wave. Hit this right and you’re
pretty much on autopilot for the rest of the run. The rapid will funnel your boat toward a crashing thunderous white
frothy spot in the river that the veterans call the V wave. I nod and pretend to see something V-shaped as they explain
it to me over and over. The V wave, apparently, is a narrow slot that your raft will shoot through, where a four-foot
lateral wave will break over each side of the boat, burying you in white water.

Once you come through that you’ll meet the BLR–the Black Lava Rock–a name that confuses me at first, until I figure
out that the BLR is no longer black but is a light beige to tan instead. I reorient myself by mentally translating the
B in BLR to Big, which still fits. The BLR is a giant rock at the bottom of the run’s right side. Its foot is coated
with green slime, and there are big waves which might wash a boat partway up the rock. But Lava is a relatively
beginner-friendly rapid, I’m told. It flushes everything downstream one way or another. Assuming you make it past the
Ledge Hole.

The Run

Finally most of the other groups’ boats are out-of-the-way and it’s time for some of us to make the run. My boat, Fat
George, is tied directly to shore, with about half a dozen other rafts tied to it. I’ll be one of the last boats down.
First I watch Yoshie shove off, rowing Cece toward the rapid. Then David shoves off and rows out into the current,
disappearing around a corner. Some of the dories have already gone through ahead of them. I’ll be next.

I scramble along the shore and untie my bow line, coil it neatly in my hand. Take a long look around my boat to make sure
everything is strapped and double-strapped. Look again. Tighten the straps on my PFD, and on my hat. Then a shove off
from the rocks and I’m coasting out into the current.

I quickly slide around a corner where the top of Lava Falls comes into view. As in other big rapids, the top is a
horizon line below which the world drops away. The entry ought to be easy to line up; I’m aiming to slide down the
far right side of the smooth V which pours over the Ledge Hole. I keep Fat George sideways so I can make small lateral
adjustments, keeping my boat pinned to the edge of the V, far away from the Ledge Hole. I’m right where I want to
be–I think.

And then the V steepens and I’m sliding faster. I’m vaguely aware of the camera crew and other people watching from
the rocks on river right, but my attention is focused on lining up right. I’m pushed past the Ledge Hole–I think my
entry is still about right, but everything looks different from water level and after all there are no guarantees–and
then I’m into the first lateral wave.

The rest of the run–the brief time I spend aboard the raft, anyway–is a series of snapshots rather than a continuous
memory of events. I’m in my raft, and we seem to be at the bottom of a large hole in the water. I look up. Above me is
a small circle of blue sky. On every side, and closing in on that circle of blue sky, squeezing it smaller and smaller
until its no bigger than a vaguely benevolent eye staring down from the Canyon rim, is white. Frothing waving crashing
thunderous white. Left. Right. Forward. Back. Above. White.

And then a brief sensation of being catapulted through the air, the oars yanking me from my seat like a rag doll, and
I’m in the water, hanging onto the side of my raft. I’ve joined the Colorado River Swim Club.

Later, dry on shore, I ask Norm Takasugawa what happened. He was running the camera on the high scout point, so he had
a good view.

“So what happened?” Norm says. “You fell out of the boat and went swimming.”

Hoping for further explication–I really have no memory other than a trampolining feeling as I was thrown from the
boat–I ask Norm to tell me more. Apparently I made it past the V wave, where white water was pouring in from all
sides at once, but didn’t get quite as far as the BLR at the bottom of the rapid. I slid up on a wave at the base
of the BLR, Norm says.

“And then you were leaning,” he continues. “And the angle of inclination caused a slight ejection.”

A slight ejection, it turns out, is enough to put me in the water. This is water from the bottom of Lake Powell,
four hundred feet below the surface. Water that has not felt the heat of the sun’s rays for a long long time before
being released from Glen Canyon Dam to float our rafts through the Canyon. Water so cold I can’t even stand to wash
my face without a rigorous iron-willed determination–a determination I’m unable to manifest on a daily basis,
or–let’s be honest–even once every three or four days. Water so cold that I don’t even like to wade out knee-deep
in it.

If you want to be scientific about it: 47 degrees Fahrenheit, 26 or 27 Celsius.

Seriously cold water.

And I’m immersed in it, wearing nothing but K-Mart board shorts (they have a nice flowery pattern), my newly donated
Patagonia rain jacket, a cotton tank top, a ninety-nine-cent thrift store fleece my wife gave me in 2001, my new
pre-seasoned river hat, and Teva sandals.

And I have not even the slightest awareness of the cold. I’m laughing my fool head off, laughing so hard that it doesn’t
even occur to me to try too hard to climb back into my raft. And when I do try, I find it’s a lot harder than i expected.
The fat rubber sides of the raft give no purchase for my feet. I try to step up on a dangling oar–it’s been popped out
of the oarlock and is hanging from its leash–but finally just give up and keep laughing.

Meanwhile whistles are blowing and rescue boats are converging from all directions. A raft. Another raft. A couple of
inflatable kayaks. I’m in the tail waves of the rapid and there are no rocks to hit, no dangers to face. Finally one
raft crew grabs my raft and pulls it to shore while a kayaker maneuvers close enough that I can climb aboard his boat
and then hop onto my raft.

My new river hat is still in place.

I start whistling the theme from “Raiders of the Lost Ark” as I pull on a dry shirt and jury-rig a clothesline from my
boat to a tree on shore and hang my wet clothes to dry. Then I pull out a celebratory gourmet lollipop, Pina Colada
flavor, courtesy of the Original Gourmet Candy Company of New Hampshire, via Greg Hatten, and watch the remaining
boats make the run through Lava.

While I wait for the camera crew to pack up and make the final run, I’m already dreaming up T-shirts for the Colorado
River Swim Club. A map of Grand Canyon, I decide, with a red X and a swimmer’s name at each rapid someone swam.

Hance: Hazel Clark. Granite: Randy Dersham. Crystal: Tom Martin (with an asterisk denoting a boat flip). Upset: Yoshie
Kobayashi.

And Lava Falls: Tom Pamperin.

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.

Today our run takes us from the aptly-named Mile 158.7 Mile Camp on river right to Above Anvil Camp at mile 178. Mostly
flat water punctuated with small read-and-run ripples. Huge red cliffs dropping directly into the river on each side.

And so begins again the endless cycle of loading heavy boxes and drybags and tables and chairs and silverware and
shitboxes and paco pads and kitchen boxes and all of the acoutrements of river life, and boatmen strapping and lashing
things down and restrapping them and moving them, and people climbing from boat to boat–the routine is to tie all five
rafts together side by side, with the hard boats nestled in behind to preserve their colorful paint–and loading water
jugs and lunch boxes and breakfast boxes and spice boxes and boxes that I’m not even sure have been opened on this trip,
and then we’re off down the river.

And near disaster–I accidentally half-fill my hot cocoa mug with coffee instead of hot water. Some quick thinking, and
two cocoa packets instead of my normal one, and I transform near disaster into an exquisite pre-breakfast super-mocha.
Life on the river is a hard life, and only quick thinking and cat-like reflexes prevent disaster at every turn.

Then finally the boats are untied and the lines are cast off and the boats spin off one by one into the rapid below camp
and we’re off. Twenty easy miles. By the time I’m untied I’m barely ahead of Norm and Ian in the sweep boat, with Pam
Mortenson riding shotgun in my raft Georgie–aka Fat George. We coast along for a while and then it dawns on me that
Cece Mortenson, our new crew replacement, doesn’t have a boat to row. She doesn’t seem like someone who’d suffer the
utter passivity of being a mere passenger very well–she’s a mountain guide, climber, and Antarctic survival specialist
among other things–so I decide I’ll catch up to her and offer to let her row my raft.

The fact that by the time I catch up to her will probably be at the height of the usual afternoon headwinds has nothing
to do with my decision.

An hour of hard rowing and I’ve caught up to the five wooden boats, leaving the other rafts far behind. And Cece is
already rowing, having taken over the Susie R for the moment. All that effort wasted. Fortunately I arranged this
morning’s load in a configuration of optimal comfort, with four dry bags tied down in a heap behind the rowing station,
forming a perfect backrest. And the headwinds have failed to materialize with any strength, so I lean back and let Fat
George float at the speed of the sluggish current.

At Fern Glen’s sandy beach we stop for lunch. Far up the beach there’s a line of driftwood logs, the perfect height,
I theorize, to form a headrest for anyone lying on the sand. Greg Hatten, Ian McCluskey, and I submit the theory to
rigorous empirical testing. Theory proved.

Then after lunch it’s back to the boats. I wrangle Cece onto Fat George and in the guise of a generous offer, convince
her to row. I’m on bow watch. Bow watch involves sitting on the bow, reclining langorously, with my new pre-seasoned
river hat pulled low over my eyes.

And then we’re in camp where it’s time for the evening entertainment. First, there’s Greg Hatten’s demonstration of
removing a cork from inside a wine bottle (we’ve generated our share of empty wine bottles). Then card tricks–sadly,
my famous Canadian Mounties trick goes awry when the three of diamonds shows up inauspiciously in the wrong place.
Then it’s on to logic puzzles: how old is the bus driver? How much time did Bob spend walking? And then supper.
Another tough day on the river.

Tomorrow we hit Lava Falls, just two miles downstream from camp. I’ve loaned my drysuit to Cece in the theory that if
I do anything special to prepare for immersion, I’ll get what I’ve prepared for. I’ll be sailing through in shorts, my
new Patagonia jacket, and my river-worn hat.

It’s a big rapid; one out of eight boats flipped last year. We’ll see what happens.